Summary Of "Historiographical Discourse" By Authier & Romeu - UNIVERSITY SUMMARIES - E-book - ePub

We have summarized the essential of this book by the author. Historiographical discourse: explanation, argumentation, ideological implication. The product of historical work is a verbal structure, in the form of a prose narrative discourse, which attempts to be a model of past processes and structures, whose representation serves to explain them. This work is an attempt to identify the structural components of this discourse.
Considering the historical works as verbal structures, they can account for the same data, using conceptual apparatuses with totally different formal characteristics. In a historical work, the following levels of conceptualization can be distinguished: a) chronicle, b) history, c) intrigue, d) argumentation and e) ideological implication. Chronicle and history constitute a first level of conceptualization, the "'primitive" elements in historical discourse, since both represent processes of selection and ordering of data taken from an unprocessed historical record.
The elements of the historical field constitute a chronicle when the events are ordered taking into account the time line of occurrence. The chronicle is organized as a story when the facts are treated as parts of a process in which an origin, middle and end are proposed; the facts, at the same time, are hierarchical and assigned a specific function. At a second level of conceptualization, the relationship between a given story and other stories that could be identified in the chronicle is raised.
This level includes the explanation by: a) intrigue, b) argumentation and c) ideological implication.