Overview

Parahistory and the Popular Past challenges the tired debate over historical fact versus fiction by focusing on what really matters: how different forms of representation create meaning and establish responsibility. Moving beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries, this book diagnoses a fundamental tension between history’s objectives and the generic forms available to achieve them. It develops a pragmatic, present-minded historical consciousness that foregrounds ethical responsibility while engaging with contemporary communicative realities. Through detailed investigations of narrative conventions, genre and historical experience, the book distinguishes between the historical and practical past. Theoretical insights are deepened through sustained analyses of works like Josef Škvorecký’s The Engineer of Human Souls, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. With these analyses, the book develops reading practices to deal with the autonomy of artistic works, demonstrating how they construct complex meanings and reshape audience responsibility. By reconceptualizing the field in terms of a broad history culture, it positions professional history and parahistory as related meaning-making practices, shifting focus from boundary-policing toward the ethical implications of representation for contemporary readers and publics. This book is essential reading for historians, literary scholars and anyone interested in how we make sense of the past.

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9780367368449

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Reviews

Parahistory and the Popular Past is a much-needed critical engagement with the relationship of academic history to its larger publics. With clear philosophical precision, it challenges the disciplinary orthodoxies that limit experiments with history-writing. It is a must read for those of us eager to address the current crisis that confronts the field. Joan W. Scott, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey Parahistory and the Popular Past thoughtfully explores alternative forms for thinking and writing history. Pihlainen persuasively argues that a focus on the form of historical articulation enables a diversification of understanding. The book is challenging, bracing, and thoroughly enjoyable in its rethinking of the modes and types of historical experimentation and their consequence. Jerome de Groot, University of Manchester Parahistory and the Popular Past asks us to grapple in a serious way with what Pihlainen calls “history culture,” a broad category encompassing both academic history and more popular and parahistorical engagements with the past. To make this case, Pihlainen moves with great agility between careful readings of the major theorists of history and close readings of parahistorical texts from Josef Škvorecký’s The Engineer of Human Souls to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. In this bold and powerful text, Pihlainen argues for freeing parahistory from disciplinary and disciplined history, making space for its imaginative and creative engagements with the past, engagements that might foster critical dialogue outside the walls of academic history. Parahistory and the Popular Past is a must read for scholars and students contemplating what history is and why it matters. Alison Landsberg, George Mason University, Virginia

Author Information

Kalle Pihlainen is associate professor of theory and philosophy of history at the University of Turku. His research examines historical representation and the uses of history across academic and popular contexts. He is the editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice. His previous books include The Work of History (2017) and Historia Fallida (2023).

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