Introduction: “ How to Tell a Story?”: History, Cultural Memory, Storytelling, Fiction

The studies that appear in the present issue of Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire constitute the most significant contributions stemming from the conference entitled “ How to Tell a Story? – On the Relating of History: Arts, Narration, and Cultural Memory” (“ Comment raconter? – La mise en récit de l’Histoire: Les arts, la narration et la mémoire culturelle”). The conference was held on 6-7 December 2013 at Université libre de Bruxelles where scholars from Belgium, France, Italy, Czech Republic, Poland and Germany shared their ideas by presenting their papers. The present volume gathers articles focusing on complex relations between historiography, literature, cultural memory and narratology. The articles deal with topics concerning literature, cultural memory and history of the Central and East-European region but deal also with the literary and historiographical legacy of the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi regime in Germany or the witness accounts on the Soviet Gulag. What links all the present texts is the interest in the mechanisms of collective and individual cultural memory and the ways they play out in historiography and fiction (or arts in general). The starting point of the conference was a question that we challenged ourselves to ask and try to answer in our contributions: What is the relation between works of art and historiography when it comes to the description and relating of history? All testimonies and all types and genres of texts are indeed constructed narratives. Hence the objective of the present studies, which is to question the methods and narrative structures used both by artists and historians in their respective narratives of historical events. The methodological frame of the articles is rich and varied. Nevertheless, there are certain theoretical and critical references that appear systematically in most of the texts. The cultural memory studies have a long history, dating back to the research of Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory in the 1920s and 1930s and continuing later by contributions of scholars such as Aleida and Jan Assmann in Germany (continued by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning) or Pierre Nora in France in the 1980s. The groundbreaking theoretical works on the writing and narrating of history and its relation to literary theory and fiction by Hayden White (born in 1928), Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) and Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) are certainly the first ones to be mentioned and most contributors draw on these theoretical foundations in their studies. The decade of 1970s, with the development of postmodern philosophy and thought is certainly an important moment for the contemporary

Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis, 95, 2017, p. 501-506