The aim of the course is to provide students with a concise overview of historians' thinking about their subject and practice, namely the past and its recording. What is history and how should it be written? What is the most appropriate method of approaching the past? Starting from these questions, the teaching will focus on how historians have addressed central issues such as the possibility of real knowledge of past events, the objectivity of their method and the aims of historical scholarship. In order to emphasise this, the syllabus will be divided into four major chronological periods: Greco-Roman antiquity, the modern era (15th-18th centuries), the age of historicism and nationalism, and the 20th century.
By the end of the semester students will be able to know the main historiographical currents from antiquity to the present day. They will understand the cultural dimension and the limitations to which the practices of recording and representing the past are subject. Furthermore, since the course is structured with the ambition of familiarising participants with contemporary epistemological concerns, the teaching aims at historicising these historiographical practices, contrasting them with older analytical schemes and linking them to the social, political and economic developments that have taken place on a global scale in the last twenty years.
Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: The world of Herodotus. From the Preamble of Historia to the (re)discovery of the "savages"
Week 3: History and discourse in Thucydides
Week 4: Ancient Poetics and the "end of history". The imaginary dialogue between Aristotle and Polybius
Week 5: History and Rhetoric: from Cicero to artes historicae
Week 6: 15th - 17th century: history as a non-genre
Week 7: 18th century: philosophical history (Hume, Robertson, Gibbon)
Week 8: 19th century (I): the age of revolutions (Macaulay, Carlisle, Michele, Taine)
Week 9: 19th century (II): History as a science
Week 10: 19th century (III): National histories
Week 11: 20th century (I): the Annales School and the other human and social sciences (sociology, economics, anthropology)
Week 12: 20th century (II): from American social history to the "linguistic turn"
Week 13: Historical science in Greece
3 hour lectures course
Commenting on written and audiovisual sources
Written exam