| Popis: |
Throughout his extensive work, Frank Ankersmit presents a mode of reading that informs his philosophy of history. He has commented in passing that the visuality of his approach is a Dutch trait, and that historical works succeed when they serve as a “belvedere,” offering a panoramic view. His discussions of Erich Auerbach and Hayden White reveal his own reading protocols, which differ from those of the great readers Auerbach and White, however, in that Ankersmit does not read his texts “proximally,” as linguistic artefacts. Instead, he favors a “distal” stance from his texts in order to see the work as a whole, as a pictorial narratio. In this way, the reader-viewer may experience an aesthetic mood like the one Ankersmit feels, for example, when confronted by a Guardi painting. Further, in his discussion of Gibbon and Ovid, he shows that the myth of Narcissus, in which admiration of an image is replaced by a mere echo, reveals a danger of historical representation and the need for a metamorphic picture, blurring the contours. If we consider Ankersmit as a reader with a pictorial sense, whether “Dutch” or not, his position as a philosopher of experience will come into better focus. |
