History v historical fiction

[Mark Kohut]

as came up during last mason & dixon read:
The postmodern challenge arrived with Hayden White's Metahistory (1973)

On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 4:52 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> As for "real history" itself--the traditional object, however it may be
> defined, of what used to be the historical novel--it will be more revealing
> now to turn back to that older form and medium and to read its postmodern
> fate in the work of one of the few serious and innovative leftist novelists
> at work in the United States today, whose books are nourished with history
> in the more traditional sense and seem, so far, to stake out successive
> generational moments in the "epic" of American history, between which they
> alternate. E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime gives itself officially as a panorama of
> the first two decades of the century (like World’s Fair); his most recent
> novel, Billy Bathgate, like Loon Lake addresses the thirties and the Great
> Depression, while The Book of Daniel holds up before us, in painful
> juxtaposition, the two great moments of the Old Left and the New Left, of
> thirties and forties communism and the radicalism of the 1960s (even his
> early western may be said to fit into this scheme and to designate in a less
> articulated and formally self-conscious way the end of the frontier of the
> late nineteenth century).
>
> http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/jameson/jameson.html
>
> On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 7:56 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'm not convinced by Jane Smiley's argument about history and fiction
>> making; she slaps at the condescender, Niall Ferguson, a face most readers
>> of The Guardian want to slap at too, then goes on to promote herself and her
>> books. What she says about fiction and history, historical fiction, is
>> mostly bullshit. Flowers in a vase, constructs, logic. What rubbish.
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 5:44 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Agree. He projects his biased world.
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPad
>>>
>>> > On Oct 17, 2015, at 6:44 PM, Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com>
>>> > wrote:
>>> >
>>> > Ferguson barely cuts it as a 'secondary' historian.
>>> >
>>> > -----Original Message-----
>>> > From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
>>> > Behalf Of Dave Monroe
>>> > Sent: 17 October 2015 23:10
>>> > To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>>> > Subject: History v historical fiction
>>> >
>>> > Historical fiction is not a secondary form – I was condescended to by a
>>> > conservative historian who cannot see that he too constructs stories
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/15/jane-smiley-niall-ferguson-history-versus-historical-fiction
>>> >
>>> > Thanks, Doug Millison!
>>> > -
>>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
>>> >
>>> > -
>>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>>
>
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