History as "Cemeteries within Cities"

Some questions to consider about history and historiography as we blog and get ready for class. I'll add more to this list.

--What do we make of Marx's claim that history is the history of class struggle?
--And in what ways do you see Marx's claims anchoring the future study of social histories? In what ways are we indebted to Marx, but also, in what ways, has the crisis in historical materialism shifted the emphasis in social histories?
--How might we tie Marx into DeCerteau's point on p. 58 that "all historiographical research is articulated over a socioeconomic, political, and cultural place of production" (58).

--I was interested in DeCerteau's point about the archive and information retrieval. I think he poses some interesting points about the archive as an institutionalized informatics of retrieval (the sciences of information). After reading DeCerteau, what statements are you formulating about the archive as an entity, a technology, a place?

Take a look at the passage on p. 87 of DeCerteau--the "cemeteries within cities":

"it [history] functions as an inverted image: it gives way to lack and yet hides it; it creates these naratives of th epast which are the equivalent of cemeteries within cities; it exorcises and confesses a presence of death amidst the living" (87). HIstoriography produces history and tells stories (87). How does writing, how does narrative shape history? Bringing in rhetoric and logic, DeCerteau addresses how history draws on syllogism and enthymeme (for explication).

There is a "French connection" at work here in the readings--Foucault and DeCerteau. Discuss the synergies and distinctions across these texts and account for the role of the French context on both.

I'd like to address geneaology as Foucault defines it in relation to historical discourse.

More on Nietzsche later. He requires his own blog post!