O historičnem diskurzu

Contemporary problematisation of historical methodology has been in recent decades inspired also with achievements of two other sciences traditionally relatively remote from history, viz. linguistics and narratology. The awareness that history is primarily what can be described and not what has happened has meant a shift in historiographic self-reflection from the illusion of a past event reference to a more realistic concept of narrative strategy in which the significances of past events are realized. History borrows its narrative strategies directly from literature or rather from literary sciences, which in the 20th century described relatively in detail a number of narrative schemata and promoted today's almost irreplaceable models of »the point of view« and - related to it - positions of the author's, the narrator's and the main character's word. With the awareness that historiography is primarily a description and as such naturally subject to various narrative manipulations, the science of history has made a first step towards a »responsible« approach to its own activities. It should be emphasized, however, that one historical discipline, viz. literary history, remains quite remote from the contemporary aproach to its own narrative processes. It seems to have remained dominated by outlived historical categories that contemporary history attempts to leave behind. This fact is even more surprising as literary studies itself has often emphasized the importance of artistic thinking, which is determined by the categories of verbal realisation and sense, and to a much lesser extent by extra-linguistic and extra-literary categories. While the science of history is already exploring processes of assigning meaning and sense to past events through verbalisation, literary history has not found yet a way to impart sense to all past processes of text production, which also define literature in one way or another.