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“Boundless dreams of the Levant”: Paul Wittek, the Geokge-Kreis, and the writing of Ottoman history 1.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Colin Heywood
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Extract

That history may be read as literature is an aesthetic judgment, which does not deflect from the essential difference between the two modes. To paraphrase Gibbon, who above all in this context knew what he was talking about, “the end of history is truth … the end of poetry is pleasure”. History, by definition, must fail to attain its ultimate goal of recreating the past “exactly as it happened”: that such is the case, whether because of the fallibility of the human intellect, or the difficulty (but not impossibility) of constructing history in a non-linear mode, or even – that stock excuse of historians – the doubtful, maybe putatively “fictional” quality of “the sources” – does not mean, as is from time to time suggested, that the attempt should not be made, or that history and fiction are indistinguishable. Intent, in this context, is all, nor should one forget that earlier proponents of fictionalised history may on occasion prove to be somewhat uncomfortable intellectual bedfellows.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 121 , Issue 1 , January 1989 , pp. 32 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1989

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References

2 Gibbon, Edward, Horace's Art of Poetry with two dissertations on Drama and Poetic Imitation, Cambridge, 1757Google Scholar, quoted (without page reference) by Bennett, J. A. W., Essays on Gibbon, Cambridge (Privately Printed), 1980, p. 4Google Scholar.

3 That it is the very impossibility of ever achieving the Rankean ideal which validates historical enquiry as an epistemologically autonomous activity goes without saying: cf. for what I take to be a coherent defence of (amongst other things) this view, Oakeshott, Michael, On History and other essays, Oxford, 1983Google Scholar.

4 “Wittek and the Austrian tradition”, JRAS 1988/1, pp. 7–25, where (p.8, n.5; p.9, n.13) further bibliographical references to Wittek's career and publications are provided.

5 At the Near Eastern Center, University of Michigan, in the academic year 1967–8.

6 In fact since 1971. I record my indebtedness to my former colleague at the University of California, Los Angeles, Professor J. D. J. Waardenburg, of Lausanne University, for his comments on my original and still only partially fulfilled plan for a study on “causation and its rationalisation in the interpretation of early Ottoman history”, when we discussed it in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in March 1971.