TOWARDS A THEORY OF THE MIDDLE GROUND

Abstract

Among topical questions on historical interpretation discussed in this article the autor tries to sketch answers on folowing: how are we to accept the challenge that semiotics and postmodernism poses to historical writing and at the same time preserve some of the traditional goals that have always engaged historians on the deepest level of their commitment to understanding the past: to recover the ways in which men and women have struggled with the contingencies and complexities of their lives in terms of the fates that history deals out to them and have transformed the worlds they inherit and pass on to future generations ? Are we to believe that our representations of the past are more than illusory realist canvases, intelligible lies we tell ourselvs and others in order to mask our fear that what lurks behind is the unintelligible truth of human experience, which defies any and all attempts to apprehend it in the now fractured artifice of our words?