Historical Methods: Issues of Narrativity in Historiography

Abstract

This paper explores the emergence of narrative and subsequent narrativity in historical discourses. It engages with different schools of historiography to understand dualistic nature of narrative and major themes of narratology. It is seen through the lenses of cultural studies and social sciences. Narrative has changed through feminism, post-colonialism and minority studies. Though narrative is essential, it is upto the historian what to include and what to exclude while disseminating the available data i.e. facts at his/her disposal. Thereafter, it becomes the dominant narrative due to highlighting certain facts. Therefore, the responsibility of an individual historian becomes much more important to connect with the past and interpret as it was. Thus, a narrative should be rooted in temporal and spatial dimensions with consistency of facts and resultant interpretations.

It is important to reconstruct the past through interpretation of narrative rather than objective empirical understanding. Historical knowledge is created through nature of narrative and content of form, not by the facts itself as historians are also human beings. We are affected by the environment, upbringing, emotions and contemporary events which shape our understanding. Reconstruction of the past depends on the accessibility to evidence which takes us closer to the truth of the past but not as it happened or one hundered percent truth. Linear time and contemporary time are both important for us to interpret the past of humanity.