impositionalism

[Joel S. Berson]

At 8/25/2008 03:34 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Not in OED.
>
>1997-2002 Alun Munslow _Reappraisals: What Is History?_
>[http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/reapp/carr.html]: Carr's
>unwillingness to accept the ultimate logic of, in this instance, the
>narrative impositionalism of the historian, and his failure to
>recognise the representational collapse of history writing, even as
>he acknowledges that "the use of language forbids him to be neutral"
>(Carr 1961: 25), has helped blind many among the present generation
>of British historians to the problematic epistemological nature of
>the historical enterprise.
>
>Translation:
>Unlike the extreme relativists, Carr did not believe that historians
>always set out history and impose their own interpretations without
>sifting the evidence.

Well translated from the poststructuralese, Jon!  And having read
him, I'm on the side of the farsighted Carr (1961) in his "George
Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures" at Cambridge Univ.  I see Carr has a
_What is History Now_ (Palgrave, 2002), but I doubt not that he
remains far from Munslow.

Joel

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