HISTORY, THEORY, VERTIGO

HOMODIEGESIS IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORIOGRAPHY

Andrew Baird

Review of Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography, by Enzo Traverso, translated by Adam Schoene (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022)

History and Theory 64, no. 1 (2025)

Enzo Traverso's Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography argues that contemporary historical writing is undergoing a “subjectivist turn” characterized by the increasing prevalence of first-person narration, or homodiegesis. Traverso attributes this shift to the influence of neoliberalism and its emphasis on individual experience. This review essay follows Judith Surkis's analysis of the linguistic turn in questioning whether “turn talk” obscures more than it illuminates about contemporary historiography, especially given the extreme diversity of the field in terms of method, object, and approach. This essay proposes Hayden White's notion of the “practical past” as a better context for understanding the increasing prevalence of first-person narration in historiography, insofar as it brings to the foreground what is lost or ruled out when history bases its authority and epistemological status on third-person narration and a rigid distinction between historical and literary writing.