The Deconstructing And Reconstructing Of History: A Study Of Post-modernism Historiography Meta-fiction

In the second half of the20thcentury, post-modernism swept through almost allthe cultural fields.The so called post-modernism has some major characteristics such asfragmented, pluralistic and decentralized, and these led many humanity instutions,including the philosophy of history, began to rethink themselves. During thepost-modern times, researchers started to pay attention to the contradictions anddivisions in the highly inclusive concept ‘history’. They began to ask and rethink thedeliberately ignored and evaded parts in the traditional history writings. In the contextof post-modernism,‘history’ lost its ‘superior’ status. The history text became onetext in all texts; the history narrative became one narrative of all narratives. The newunderstanding of historical issues spread to the literature and fiction field from thefield of philosophy of history. In the field of fiction, there shows a trend of returningto the history with questions centered in recent years. A large number of novels beganto focus on the history and the past. But rooted in post-modernism, these novels havea very clear self-consciousness of history and history narrative. The authors faced theprocess of history writings, and presented history as a question by deconstructing andreconstructing history. The Canadian scholar Linda Hutheon called this kind of novel‘historiography meta-fiction’, which is often seen as a kind of text ‘more than anacademic paper’. Though living in a so called post-modern society, the historiographymeta-fiction does not agree with the opinion of expelling the history. Believing that‘history’ was a real past, a real experience of human beings, historiographymeta-fiction knows it is responsible for preserving human. And of course the ‘past’may become a guarantee to the human present and future. Returning to history byquestioning history, historiography meta-fiction is filled with post-modernistcontradictions.This paper combined historiography meta-fiction’s appearance with thepost-modernism turning of philosophy of history, and considers it as a response to the post-modernism ideological trend. The paper summarizes the ideological foundation,text features and the text meanings of historiography meta-fiction, and points out thehistoriography meta-fiction has its own features in writing history. It also finds thecontradictions between the regularities of history meanings and the restoring ofhuman experiences. It is also alert to the control of power in history narratives. Theseare also the main innovations of this paper.This paper is divided into6parts:The introduction section discusses the turning of history themes in literaturewritings as well as the post-modernism turning of the philosophy of history. Thehistoriography meta-fiction agrees that history writing was a kind of text constructingthe same as literature and novel. Rhetoric and the language habits were its primaryfactors too. Therefore, historiography meta-fiction determined to structure history inits own way. In this part, the paper also summarized historiography meta-fiction’sstudy status nowadays, especially Hutheon’s study on it.Chapter1mainly discusses the basic characteristics of historiographymeta-fiction, points out that the ideological basis of historiography meta-fiction wasthe post-modernism philosophy of history. In this part, the paper made a cross-overstudy to historiography meta-fiction and the post-modernism philosophy of history.Chapter2discusses the historical representing way of historiography meta-fiction.The narrative in historiography meta-fictions is a kind of narrative much likehistorical research. It focuses on the relationship between the people and the past aswell as the relationship between the existence of the past and the telling of the past.The historiography meta-fiction builds its own text on a chain of active narratives,representing history as an unfolding process, makes the text a body filled withrepeatedly explanations.Chapter3explores the historiography meta-fiction’s deconstruction of history. Inthe period of post-modernism, writers of historiography meta-fiction finds there is a‘meta-history’ as a discourse and a power in history narratives like the historians. Andthe center of the discourse is actually ‘the Great Story’. The historiographymeta-fiction opposes to the ‘meta-history’ narratives, deconstructing and digesting itin an ironical way, shaking the basis and the form of traditional history narrative. This chapter has two parts:1, the deconstruction of history narrative;2, the deconstructionof history telling.Chapter4discusses the historiography meta-fiction’s reconstruction of history. Itmainly uses the following ways:1, revisiting the lost parts of history writings;2,imitating the biographical literatures;3, dialogue with the contemporary problems.Through reconstructing history, historiography meta-fiction rediscoveres the closerelationship between human beings and the past.Chapter5discusses the meanings of historiography meta-fiction as theconclusion of this paper. The historian Jorn Rüsen said that ‘there were many openingfutures in the past’, and this is also the reason why more and more writers pick uphistory as their writing subjects. The historiography meta-fiction questions on thetimes, the moral, and the future of human world through writing the past. Inhistoriography meta-fiction, the most important thing is not whether the historywriting’s real or not, the historiography meta-fiction was written to make peoplere-evaluate the judgments about history narratives. After all, history narratives areresponsible for understanding people and people’s behaviors; it not only hassomething to do with today, but also opens to the future.