CTI Statement of Purpose - Historiography & Critical Theory

Perhaps no issue is more fundamental in the critical investigation of historical representation than that of the historical subject. Since the Enlightenment, both empirical and theoretically informed historians have generally assumed the rationality of the historical subject, whether individual or collective, and on this basis have projected an inherent rationality onto the entire historical process. Whether influenced by Enlightenment philosophers, Hegel, Marx, Meinecke, Dilthey, Weber or, more recently, by the Frankfurt School, historians have tended to work within a predominantly rationalist schema and to accept the implicit or explicit teleology it imposes on history. Recent critical work has sought to open up the historical field to “subject,” forces, movements, forms of representation, etc. that had been excluded or marginalized by the different forms of rationalist teleology. Thus the work of Michel Foucault calls into question the assumptions of much theoretically informed historiography and suggests new directions for research, especially in regard to the relation between theory and empirical historical investigation. Along with the work of others in historiography and philosophy—e.g. Hayden White, Carlo Ginzburg, Michel de Certeau, Hans Blumenberg—Foucault’s work offers ways to analyze critically the epistemological and ideological bases of history and to develop alternative methodologies for the study of history drawing on the tools of linguistics, rhetoric, communication theory, narratology, etc.