This lecture will be dedicated to different forms of the presence of the past in our time. Until recently, two interrogations were essential for our reflection about history: one dealt with the epistemological consequences of the identification of rhetorical and narrative dimensions of the writing of history; the other concerned the place and role of the "historical institution". Today the main issue is the competition between various representations of the past as proposed by historical knowledge, collective memory, and literature. Therefore, this lecture will examine the construction of an imagined past by literary works, the differences and encounters between memory and history, and the relations between the writing of history and experiences of time.
Roger Chartier is Emeritus Professor at the Collège de France, Directeur d'études at he Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), and Annenberg Visiting Professor in History at the University of Pennsylvania. His field of research is the history of authorship, publishing, and reading in early modern Europe. His last books in English are Inscription and Erasure. Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, tr. Arthur Goldhammer, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007; The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind, tr. Lydia G. Cochrane, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2014; Cardenio between Cervantes and Shakespeare. The Story of a Lost Play, tr. Janet Lloyd, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013; and with Pierre Bourdieu, The Sociologist and the Historian, tr. David Fernbach, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2015.
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