Central European University A Program for University Teachers, Advanced Ph.D. Students, Researchers and Professionals in the Social Sciences and Humanities Summer University

since 19-09-2003 you are visitor no. 

5 July-16 July 2004

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Course Directors: Sorin Antohi, University Professor of History, CEU and Director, Pasts Inc. Center for Historical Studies, Tyrus Miller, Associate Professor of Literature, University of California at Santa Cruz and Director, University of California Study Center, Budapest, Hungary

Resource Persons: Wlad Godzich, Dean of Humanities and Professor of Literature, University of California at Santa Cruz, Costica Bradatan, Knight Post-Doctoral Fellow, Cornell University, Jörn Rüsen, President, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, Hayden White, Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University; Professor in the History of Ideas, University of California

Administrative Coordinator: Zsuzsa Macht, Ph.D. Coordinator, Department of History, CEU

In his classic study of mythic and historical time, Cosmos and History, Mircea Eliade opposed these two basic terms as radical alternatives, fundamentally opposed in their social, anthropological, and existential implications. This course takes up Eliade’s basic insight, his positing of a basic anthropological need to organize and control time, in social forms and practices, in systems of thought and knowledge, and in mentalities. Yet drawing on a wide range of more recent work in the theory of history, anthropology, literary theory, and philosophy, it also reconsiders Eliade’s binary opposition of cosmos and history in favor of seeing these as complementary elements within unitary "historical cosmoi," symbolic ways that societies organize and control time.

This perspective shift and the synthetic approach that follows from it hold major implications both for the theory of history and for the practice of writing history (more broadly, for historically informed humanistic scholarship). We suggest a positive interpretative framework to evaluate forms of historical thought-systems that have been largely excluded from modern professional history, such as philosophies of history, theologies of history, and "native" historical cosmologies. In our practical case studies—ranging over mythic and religious thought, minority histories, collective everyday practices, dreams, and object-collections—we seek to encourage a wider embrace by historical thinking of marginal forms of memorial, artifactual, and eventual materials, until now largely treated as outside the legitimate archive of historically interpretable materials.

The concept of historical cosmoi justifies interdisciplinary and cross-cultural consideration of theologies, philosophies of history and historiographies, ethnographic conceptions, and scientific paradigms as comparable symbolic modes of organizing time. Correlatively, this basic framework suggests cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural ways of interpreting a range of social and cognitive systems in light of the problem of symbolically organized time. Although the course in no way can survey all the relevant literature and debates that are evoked by its approach and stated topics, it aims to consider key nodal points of an ambitious, synthetic, interdisciplinary framework that can serve as a point of departure for theory and research in a number of scholarly fields.

The course has three major topical sections: "History and Cosmos," "De-Universalizing History," and "Critiquing Historicism." The first, "History and Cosmos," provides a general conceptual framework for the more specific topics considered in the later sections. These later sections consider the implications and applications of the history-cosmos conceptual framework for historiography and philosophy of history. The topics within these sections each specify and apply the view of historical thought as constructed symbolic cosmoi. The individual topics are clustered around two major critical implications of the history-cosmos concept:

Section one, "History and Cosmos," then, focuses on these two basic modes of organizing time and the symbolic mechanisms that underlie them. Here we synoptically consider how time gets captured and contained within symbolically-organized structures such as narratives and other "chronotopic" figures, and we discuss the semiotic, rhetorical, and poetic means by which these structures are constructed and interpreted.

In the second section "De-Universalizing History," we take up recent challenges to the view of history that conceives it as a universal medium allowing chronometric correlations between events of different orders and in different spaces. We sketch an alternative view of "global" history that emphasizes active, open dynamics of cross-cultural translation and creative misunderstanding, analogical and poetic transformation of other systems, and detachment / reattachment of minority elements within larger historico-cosmic systems.

The final part, "Critiquing Historicism," considers basic concepts and topics of historiography in light of the idea of historical cosmoi. In particular, we focus on the conceptual foundations of historicist theory and practice: its notions of context, event, temporal continuity, causality, and singularity in historical time. Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary study of historical cosmoi not only provides new subject-matter for the researcher, but also may also suggest new methodologies, new forms of historical "source materials", and new interpretative frameworks for historically oriented scholarship.

The final colloquium is meant to be a culmination of the course by means of a thorough intellectual exchange between resource persons and course participants. Plans for future collaboration will also be presented.

I. History and Cosmos: In this section of the course, the basic framework of the opposition of history and cosmos will be considered. Key questions in this section include: