当专著不再是媒介:网络时代的历史叙事

Historical Narration in the Online Age When The Monography Is No Longer the Medium

在过去的50年中,出现了众多关于叙事在历史知识中的价值的讨论。而在其中,"叙事"则表现为一个给定的、并且仅与认识论相关的概念。笔者不认同这种观点。"叙事"的概念随文化实践的变化而变化,并且在独立专著这一特定的与讲故事相关的媒介中被暗中模仿。关于"历史的自然形式就是一个历史学家作为个体写作的一本书"这样的信念内在于20世纪中绝大多数关于"叙事"的讨论,这意味着语言的首要性、著者的自主性、作品的独立性被认为是理所当然的。然而,在新的传媒生态中,独立专著的"自然性"不应继续被当作是既定的。数字化和因特网为制造和传播历史知识提供了新技术,而在这一过程中,职业历史学家同时面临机遇和挑战。在其实用意义之外,数字媒体在"其社会产物由不同平台上的多种媒介所产生"这一方面,为考察历史叙事提供了一种新的理论模型,并且改变了我们关于过去与未来的实践的理解。

Over the last fifty years there has been much discussion about the value of narrative on the production of historical knowledge where by it is generally assumed that ‘narrative’ is a given and only thing at the issue about its epistemological value.This article critically examines this assumption.It shows how conceptions of narrative have mutated in response to changes in cultural practice and,as importantly,how they have been im plicitly modeled on the particular medium envisaged for telling stories:the stand-alone monograph.The belief that history's natural form is a book written by an individual historian has thus informed most discussions of narrative in the twentieth century,meaning that the primacy of language,the autonomy of the author,and the finished,self-contained character of the work have been taken for granted.The naturalness of the stand-alone monograph can no longer be taken as a given,however,in the new media ecologies.Digitization and the internet offer new technologies for producing and disseminating historical knowledge and,in the process,present both opportunities and challenges to professional historians.Beyond their practical implications,the digital media al so provide a new theoretical model for viewing historical narrative in terms of its social production by multiple agents across different platforms,and this changes our understanding of both the past and future practices.