Thursday, February 26, 2009
Painting History
So, class today brought up some fascinating ideas, the most relevant of which I found to be 'history'. Looking at it from the concept side of the equation, and from our extensive discussion, it does essentially define subjectivity. I think it was Churchill who said 'History is written by the victors', and that definitely highlights an extremely important consideration when assessing any historical narrative or data; the power of interpretation, and selective omission, is given solely to the writer. That being said, someone has to record what happens, and that someone is going to be human, usually. So from the outset its a flawed process, meaning that, past ensuring no overly malicious or slanderous motives on the part of the author, minor issues of emotionality and inconsistencies should be a moot point. Linda Goyette goes to great pains to cover every facet of D'edmontonia, not just the shiny ones, and her slight biases did nothing to contract from my total immersion into the stories and experiences. I believe that's called 'making history come alive', but thats a rather extreme way of throwing it down. I'll just say I liked it.
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I agree that whenever a person tells a story or writes a history a bias will exist. Sometimes a person's bias can completely exclude the experiences and opinions of entire groups of people. This is why recorded history should be looked at critically.
ReplyDeleteI think that by including several types of sources from several groups of people, Goyette is trying to give the most complete history of Edmonton possible. She is also personalizing the history by using first hand accounts. Since we know these accounts could contain biases, we can read them critically and evaluate the information they provide accordingly.
Cool post. I feel like, in my comments and in class, I'm constantly bringing up the relations between some of the things we read and my creative non-fiction class. But it's totally relevant to this class! So I'll try not to feel bad for being repetitive. Basically, though, as "writers", if you will, in this other class we are constantly searching for the definition of "truth" in writing. And I'm constantly thinking about it in this class, because each thing we read is someone else's version of the "truth" about Edmonton. And sometimes we even get to read completely different accounts of the "truth", which I think is really interesting. So just acknowledging, while reading Goyette's stories, that there will be some slight biases, is a huge, important, step in reading this kind of material. But I agree that it is nice to hear the stories from someone who tells both the good and bad aspects, as opposed to other's we've read who only talk about the happy stuff.
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