eye of the interpreter is given much more power, comparable to
an art or literary critic who looks at a painting or feels the power
to say, “I can tell you what this means. I can read this text.” This is
opposed to a much more old-fashioned sort of history that says,
“My sources say ‘x,’ and that’s what they say and I think it’s clear
what they say.” These people are totally unaware that they are, in
fact, still interpreting. In between, there is both a consciousness of
what we’re doing and a sense that, nevertheless, there are sources
that can speak.Also pointing out the polarizing role of theory, a young historian of
France sees the discipline as currently in “transition”:
There’s increasingly a kind of fragmentation in the historical field
in terms of what is good history, what is bad history, what’s the
direction that we should be moving in...It’soverprecisely the
question of the extent to which theory should be used in the writ-
ing of history and to what extent one has lost touch with social
and economic reality with the growing [dominance] in the last
tenyears...ofcultural history. At the moment we’re kind of in a
period of transition.A medieval historian summarizes what she sees as the main bases
for division within the field this way:
One divide would be those people who do theory versus those
who kind of don’t do theory, just do straight archival work. Then
there are those people who do a social kind of history versus
those who have been informed by what is called a cultural stand
and they discuss the construction of everything. Then there are
people who seize old scholarship that’s political versus that which
is not. So those are the three kinds of divides, but those dividesOn Disciplinary Cultures / 83