Making the Environment Historical — An Introduction

Abstract

‘History is a nightmare, from which I am trying to awake.’ Stephen Dedalus’ words in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses are not just the kind of words that sound familiar to a student in school who just cannot get the point of learning about all the familiar details of history: wars (mostly wars), battles (surprisingly important), royalty, leading politicians and their deeds, lineages of the welfare states, Raj and Mandarins, liberation struggles here and there, reforms and revolutions. Joyce was part of a modernist revolution of thought and form, of literary and artistic expression in early 20th century Europe, and in the mind of modernists, futurists and nihilists history was indeed, if not a nightmare, at least a burden, an unnecessary set of fetters that constrained human ingenuity and human deed. Friedrich Nietzsche, in On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874), wanted to free history from its backward looking obsession and nostalgia. History was part of making a new world; only feebleminded Ressentiment Menschen would be interested in the fine tuning of ephemeral bygones. History should be part of action, and therefore the worst enemies of future-embracing history were the historians.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.