Keith Jenkins

la era postmoderna rompe la linealidad de la concepción del tiempo histórico y abre varias posibilidades de interpretación a partir de la creación de nuevos imaginarios. Keith Jenkins analiza los textos de los pensadores más representativos: Jacques Derrida, Jean Braudillard, Jean-Francois Lyotsrd, Richard Evans, Hayden White, Frank Ankensmit, Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth y David Harlan, y muestra la existencia de nuevas formas de vivir en el tiempo pero fuera de la historia, vivir en la moral pero fuera de la ética".
¿Por qué la historia? nos permite conocer las corrientes historiográficas de vanguardia y la controversia que alrededor de ellas se ha tenido.el texto nos ubica en el debate contemporáneo acerca de la teoría de la historia, la historiografía y la teoría literaria vista desde la posmodernidad.… (mais)

I took some notes as follow:
* History claims to knowledge (rather than belief or assertion) - It makes History the discourse it is.
* What can be known and how we can know, interact with "power".
* Even the most empirical chronicles has to invent narrative structures to give shape to time and place.
* HISTORY is never for itself; it is always for someone.
* Truth is a self-referencing figure of speech, incapable of accessing the phenomenal world: word and world, word and object, remain saparate… (mais)

At only 84 pages long, this is a very small, slight paperback, but still not really worth the hour or so it took me to read. Jenkins warns you at the beginning that his work is a polemic, and he's not lying. He sets about to undermine the entire approach adopted by most western academic historians to the subject, especially through his use of postmodernism (a word which still makes many history professors shudder). I agree with some of his points, but his tone is arrogant and patronising; good for challenging you and making you think, but not in the way that Jenkins intended it.… (mais)