History is Tragic: history as longing and unintended consequences

[Mark Kohut]

I read much of one of T. Jackson Lears earlier books...I learned. I felt.  (I may even have read all of it.)
 

________________________________
 From: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
To: Al Liszt <alliszt at gmail.com> 
Cc: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Sunday, May 26, 2013 11:57 AM
Subject: Re: History is Tragic: history as longing and unintended consequences
  


Interesting interview.



On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 8:24 AM, Al Liszt <alliszt at gmail.com> wrote:

 One of the            aphorisms I resort to in Rebirth of a Nation is, “All history is the            history of longing,” but I also felt another aphorism was on point, which is            that “History is essentially tragic.” What I mean is not that history is sad,            though it often is, but that, to paraphrase the historian E. P. Thompson, all            history is the history of unintended consequences. If you look at the growth of            cultural history from the later 1970s, when I came into the field, you find an            effort to get beyond both a social history that had become largely quantitative            and an intellectual history that had become somewhat distanced from everyday            life. One thing that helped this effort, especially into the 1980s, was the            growth of semiotics. Here was a theory that said meaning doesn’t descend from            on high, from some abstract realm of ideas, but
 rather that meaning adheres in            artifacts, whether those artifacts are a sermon or a roller coaster or a radio.            That creation of meaning isn’t always intentional; it’s made by people as they            live. 
> 
>http://www.publicbooks.org/interviews/the-confidence-economy-an-interview-with-t-j-jackson-lears  
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