Conceptualizing Time in Historiography
Conceptualizing Time in Historiography
This chapter develops insights into the relation between memory, time, and history. Writing history implies the “ordering and controlling of time.” All types of history-writing, including fasti, geography, ethnography, and biography, function as literary means for the chronologizing and interpreting of time. In order to collect the necessary material (stories and facts), and then to systematically organize this material in a way that makes evident the interrelatedness of events, historians reflect on how best to subdivide and depict sequences of time. The organizing of time in the context of historiography is first of all a literary task. If narrative can best organize the experience of time, then historiography is definitive in terms of literary techniques for depicting the past.
Keywords: time, chronology, historiography, memory, history-writing, past
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