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Thinking History, History Thinking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2004

Herbert Blau
Affiliation:
University of Washington

Extract

Is there a real world out there? I'll soon be moving the question to other perceptual sites, but at bedrock, Ground Zero (now hallowed by 9/11), or when push comes to shove, making their peace with deconstruction, few historians deny it—and come, let's face it, none really can (no Bishop Berkeleys among them), it's real enough for them. With all the signifiers shifting, and some of them under erasure, there may be uncertainties in the referential structure, as out the window, through the rain, across the lake from me now in Seattle, what should be the Cascades is, with a hint of snowcaps above, mainly a minimalist gray vaporous wall of clouds, nothing to be seen on the landscape of what I am sure was there, but then for a moment the trees (from Berkeley's forest, perhaps?), but not as metahistory. And so it may be with the recuperated vagaries of any historical context that, however obscured by the years, somehow inhabited time, or survived the attritions of time, to more than suggest, if not certify, that there was a there there. The important thing, of course—no different in this millennium, but after the collapsing towers suddenly a crazier world, with there all over, dispersed or even secreted—is to determine how to get there, with the swift accrual of history affecting theatre history.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2004 The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.

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Footnotes

Herbert Blau is Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities at the University of Washington. His most recent books are Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett, Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion, and The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976–2000. He is working now on As If: An Autobiography.