Resumen de Postmodernist History
For the historian, as for the philosopher, the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns is being superseded by a quarrel between the Moderns and the Postmoderns. In literature, postmodernism amounts to a denial of the fixity of any "text," of the authority of the author over the interpreter, of any "canon" that privileges great books over lesser ones. Modernist history is not positivist, in the sense of aspiring to a fixed, total, or absolute truth about the past. Like postmodernist history, it is relativistic, but with a difference, for its relativism is firmly rooted in reality. The radical potential of postmodernism has been seized most enthusiastically by feminist historians, who find the old Marxism and even some forms of the new radicalism unresponsive to their concerns. Postmodernism is less prevalent among historians than among literary critics, although there are some who regard it, even in history, as "the orthodoxy of today."
