Hans Kellner

I can say with certainty that I did not understand everything I read in Hans Kellner’s Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked. At times it was as incomprehensible as Bud Abbott’s answer to “Who’s on first?” However, with patience and a dictionary, I managed to learn a bit about post-structuralist theory and history. His detailed description of the types of information besides ‘known’ was particularly interesting.

The middle of the book is four writings selected to demonstrate the four tropes of post-structural theory. Trope, I learned, is just a ten-dollar word for a tactic used in making an argument, a rhetorical device or a literary technique like irony, metaphor, metonymy (saying Washington what you mean the United States government), and synecdoche (saying bread to mean food or hired hand to mean worker). The real irony is that the more I read the last section of the book, detailing how these tropes work in reading scholarly histories the less I understood what they had to do with doing history. By “doing history,” I mean research and analysis of primary sources and reporting on the results.

The more effort I put into this book the more I gained from reading it. In a year or two I intend to return to it, after I gain some experience, and attempt to tease more information out of the polysyllabic verbiage. My one problem with the book is a vague feeling that some, many, of the ten-dollar words were used less to explain and more to impress. Having said that I want to reiterate that that I did not understand everything I read, my vague feeling could be totally wrong. I understand that often there is only one word that exactly expresses the writer’s intent; I just doubt it is always the longest.… (mais)