The historical present - Historum

Scipio · January 12th, 2010, 01:56 PM

What do people think about the use of this device? Obviously it's pretty popular among French Annales writers like Foucault and Braudel. It's used a bit among pop historians and post-modernists in the UK and US too. I find myself very conflicted about its use in my own work - sometimes I adore it, sometimes I cross it out in a fit of disgust at my own verbosity.

From Wikipedia, a quick definition:

Quote:

In linguistics and rhetoric, the historical present (sometimes dramatic present) refers to the employment of the present tense when narrating past events. Besides its use in writing about history, especially in historical chronicles (listing a series of events), it is used in fiction, for 'hot news' (as in headlines), and in everyday conversation (Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 129-131). In conversation, it is particularly common with 'verbs of communication' such as tell, write, and say (and in colloquial uses, go) (Leech 2002: 7).

Literary critics and grammarians have said that the historical present has the effect of making past events more vivid. More recently, analysts of its use in conversation have argued that it functions, not by making an event present, but by marking segments of a narrative, foregrounding events (that is, signalling that one event is particularly important, relevant to others) and marking a shift to evaluation (Brinton 1992: 221).

I'm interested in what people think about this because the obvious worry is that it leads to a kind of fictionalised account which sacrifices accuracy to style.

P.S. Could we confine the discussion to non-fiction works, not historical fiction. Because with the latter, the issues I identified are positive.

**Black Dog** · January 13th, 2010, 02:25 AM

I see what your concerns are. It can "cheapen" one's writing, and can make it appear "sensationalist" or Journalistic rather than scholarly. Yes, it is more vital.

However, I think that it depends on who your audience is more than anything. In a purely academic situation, you wouldn't use this device, but to those who know that this is a historical event you are writing about in the present tense, it's OK. My greatest worry would be that one's writing in such a style may well be accurate and thoughtful, but because of its style, it may simply be dismissed as Journalism.

corrocamino · January 13th, 2010, 03:42 AM

In older histories, we commonly see such expressions as "now Caesar was" (instead of "then Caesar was").

**vera** · January 13th, 2010, 03:56 AM

Yes, it is used in biographies and is very irritating, imo. I work with artists's biographies and always "translate" the story - including both language translation AND this "historical present" into normal language, to avoid this very effect, then read it through several times to see that I didn't miss any "present" events, and I always do. IT is SO annoying...

Black Dog is right, it depends on the public. I have all kinds of people, not only specialists, so I need to sound like a normal person, not an academic, in order for it to be accessible to all.