General Impressionism

I visited the Turner to Cezanne exhibit at the Everson Art Museum on Sunday. As I rocketed through the exhibit with my 7 1/2 year old (she doesn't go at my pace at all and was in a hurry to get to her favorite art forms--ceramics--in the basement), I thought of how like blogging can be like impressionistic painting at times. The outlines, contours, suggestion of light and shadow, but not the full representation of what one has encountered. This is the state I find myself in tonight as I try to think through all the complexities of what we've been reading this week.

Missy has wondered aloud on her blog about why Logan doesn't do much to describe her approach to doing history (her methodology and methods), nor offer a meta-reading of her sources. That's a good question, and it's one that Barb L'Eplattanier takes up in her recent _College English_ piece about archival research and the missing methodologies sections in most historians' accounts. I like the points made by Missy and L'Eplattanier. But let me play the Melvin Tolson's devil's advocate here. The story of Logan's research methodology and methods is, in part, in the endnotes in Logan's book, though, and that's an interesting factor to consider as we read historical research. What functions to notes play in the books/articles? There are 23 pages of end notes in this 134 page book. So we can track the origins and pathways of her reading and interaction with texts beyond the ones she can cite directly in the text itself. What I notice is that most of what she researches is availabe online in electronic archives or in published accounts, not necessarily in archives. This was interesting to see--how much can be found online--at Duke and Springarn. This is part of the changing face of archives and original materials-so many can be found online (not all, but a significant amount).

In Gold's study, we have a lengthy introduction that describes his take on the field's work with disciplinary and instituional histories, and he squarely locates himself in the tradition of revisionist history or third-wave history (6). He is a proponent of the microhistory, coming out of Levi who defines it as a "belief that microscopic obervation will reveal factors previously unobserved (95, 97)" (Gold 7). He argues that small scale histories can inform large scale histories in refreshing ways. He takes aim at the work of Berlin and others who wrote our histories of the field from the standpoint of "elite theorists" and "institutional artifacts" (6). In many ways, Berlin was doing a monumental history (term from Nietzsche) that had the overtones of critical history.

Given this description, I think we can see that Logan is also writing microhistories as well. The key diffference is that she is concerned with the community and self-sponsorship of literacy and rhetorical education in non-school sites. Gold is more interested in Chapter 1 in African American students and teachers engaging the curriculum in educational institutions. We see Enoch taking a similar microhistorical approach. This is a way to deal with scope and scale in historical research.

I wondered as I read this week about further connections to be drawn across Gold’s study and Logan's study. Did you notice how Logan mentioned Gold's study early on? I think we can draw a continuum of literacy practices across Gold and Logan's studies and perhaps even Enoch’s. What are those literacy and rhetorical practices? How do they choose to study them, and why do they pick these specific sites and locations to study? What rationales are we provided? How does the historian's own location fuel the selection of sites?

What methodological and methods-based considerations and challenges are these three authors facing as they strive to represent historical “others” and their pedagogies and literacy practices?

What do historical studies like these microhistories (Gold's term) yield? What do we gain as we read them? What kind of renewed understanding of our field?

Maybe I'll have more questions to add in the clear light of morning. But let me end with a paragraph from one of my favorite pieces by Nietzsche about the "services" that history provides (from "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" 1873):

"These are the services which history can carry out for living. Every person and every people, according to its goals, forces, and needs, uses a certain knowledge of the past, sometimes as monumental history, sometimes as antiquarian history, and sometimes as critical history, but not as a crowd of pure thinkers merely peering at life, not as people eager for knowledge, individuals only satisfied by knowledge, for whom an increase of understanding is the goal itself, but always only for the purpose of living and, in addition, under the command and the highest guidance of this purpose. This is the natural relationship to history of an age, a culture, and a people: summoned up by hunger, regulated by the degree of the need, held to limits by the plastic power within, the fact that the understanding of the past is desired at all times only to serve the future and the present, not to weaken the present, not to uproot a forceful living future."