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On What is History?: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White
 
 
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On What is History?: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (Paperback)

by Keith Jenkins (Author)
2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
RRP: £19.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 208 pages
  • Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (11 Feb 1995)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0415097258
  • ISBN-13: 978-0415097253
  • Product Dimensions: 21 x 13.8 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 443,840 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #12 in  Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Philosophy > Philosophers > More Philosophers > Rorty, Richard
    #65 in  Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Philosophy > Schools of Thought > Pragmatism

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  • See Complete Table of Contents

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Product Description

Review
'Jenkins reformulates Carr's famous question `What is History?' to devastating effect. An essential read.' - Alan White, University of East London

'Innovative, challenging, and in the context of English historical thinking, iconoclastic and important.' - Richard Brown, Manshead School

Product Description
Jenkins provides a student introduction to contemporary historiographical debates. Through its radical critique of Carr and Elton, he embraces the postmodern-type approaches of thinkers such as Richard Rorty and Hayden White.

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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On What is History?: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White
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On What is History?: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White 2.0 out of 5 stars (1)
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What is History? with a new Introduction by Richard J Evans
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars I can't see the wood for the trees., 12 May 2007
By Ps Macleod "Petermac" (Southampton, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
I came to this book fresh from just having read both Carr (What is History) and Elton (The Practice of History).I have also recently read Hobsbawm (On History), Tosh (The Pursuit of History) and Evans (In Defence of History) none of whom could be called Postmodernists. In fact Evans and to a lesser extent Tosh both criticise the Postmodernist approach with Evans laying into Jenkins in particular with some force. Like a schoolboy eager to witness the playground fight I was looking forward to Jenkins' 'On What is History' to give the low-down on the Postmodernist position. I was keen to see what was exercising Evans and I looked forward to a demolition of the established position of Carr and Elton.
So, how did it go? Did I attain my goal of getting a look at history from the Postmodern perspective? Answer: Yes. Was I convinced by the argument? Answer: Not really. It teaches you to be newly sceptical, a fine asset for a historian but I still come away with the feeling that all Postmodernism stands for is a mushy anarchism where nothing is valued or trusted. It's the sort of thinking that leads to the educationalist fad for there to be no exam failures, all pupils graduate with a pass, and the proscription of competitive games as unfair and discriminatory. Nonetheless, the argument was worth stating, if only as a foil to more established opinion.
Lastly, did I enjoy reading this book? Eh, no. In fact like Peter the Apostle, that is thrice no. Actually, reading this book was a very painful experience requiring no mean stamina on my part to reach the end of the first chapter let alone the end of the book. The problem is the way it is written. G R Elton, one of the targets of this book, was German by birth and English was not his first language, yet he wrote in a lucid and approachable style. Jenkins' effort is turgid in the extreme, the literary equivalent of a clogged artery on a high cholesterol diet. Jenkins is overly fond of jargon and name-dropping. He occasionally lapses into conversational mode with a few 'I means'. All we needed was some 'You Knows' and the dreaded adverbs 'basically, obviously and absolutely'. However, the main criticism is in the contorted and tortuous sentence construction which makes this book such a difficult read. I quote an example, and this from only page 3 of the introduction.
'For over the last twenty to thirty years there has developed around and about this dominant academic discourse a range of theories (hermeneutics, phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, new-historicism, feminism and post-feminism, post-Marxism, new pragmatism, postmodernism and so on) as articulated by a range of theorists (for example, Ricouer, Foucault, Barthes, Althusser, Derrida, Greenblatt, Kristeva, Bennett, Laclau, Fish, Lyotard et al) which have reached levels of reflexive sophistication and intellectual rigour with regard to the question of historical representation, which one could not even hazard a guess at from a reading of Carr and Elton's vintage texts - or from their later thoughts on the subject, come to that.'
That is a sentence of no less than 107 words. An exception? Almost every third sentence is of similar ilk. I suspect that many readers will fail to reach the end of this book, which is a pity as Jenkins has some interesting arguments but prose like that is just intellectual laxative. To paraphrase the Duke of Wellington, I don't know what it does for his students but it scares the hell out of me.
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