Book Review

Methods/Theory

History is in the interesting position of confronting its own historicity: this much has been enunciated and widely accepted during the past several decades. This volume is an attempt to tease out some of the implications of this fact. Its format is suitably miscellaneous, being a collection of interviews that provide fascinating and valuable glimpses into the interests and range of various European and, to a lesser extent, American historians.	1
The most attractive feature of this collection of interviews is its emphasis on the historian behind the history. Each of the ten interviews begins with the signature of the interviewee, his personal mark (no women are included among the interviewees, except for editor Ewa Domaska's coy "self-interview," about which the less said the better). A common fund of questions is presented to Hayden White, Hans Kellner, Franklin Ankersmit, Georg Iggers, Jerzy Topolski, Jörn Rüsen, Arthur Danto, Lionel Gossman, Peter Burke, and Stephen Bann. All are asked to comment in various ways on the "new" problems and opportunities presented to historians by postmodernity (the usual term in this text is "postmodernism"). Given space limits, this review will attend mainly to general outlines and problems, not individual interviews.	2
The most striking feature of the volume is its almost total confusion about the term under which it seems to be selling itself: "postmodernism." The term is treated by the editor as something that apparently has a settled definition, and is often treated by her and occasionally by her subjects as something after "modernism"—in other words, a local dispute in the twentieth century—or, worse, as a "trivializing" movement. This kind of approach has often been derived—and never to good effect—from the evangelical Marxist formulations of Frederic Jameson, although he is scarcely mentioned. Several contributors mention the influence of Michel Foucault as significant in the development of various forms of "counterhistory" (White, Kellner, Ankersmit, Topolski), and White mentions Roland Barthes as seminal. Otherwise the theoretical writing from France that grounds any understanding of the postmodern is barely mentioned. The Anglo-Germanic emphasis of this volume renders its approaches to the "postmodern" entirely unsatisfactory, precisely because of the resistant commitments to empiricism and idealism in the English and Germanic traditions.	. . .