Plato consistently holds that “no one does wrong willingly.” If this is the case, how is it possible for someone to be held morally responsible for his actions? Plato does seem not only to countenance the idea of moral responsibility but to make it a central notion in his political and eschatological writings (Section 5.1). The connection between personhood and embodiment is explored and the relevance of embodiment to moral responsibility is considered in Republic and Timaeus. The possibility of incontinence or akrasia reveals the divided selfhood in the emboodied person. The concept of culpable ignorance is introduced in order to account for moral responsibility. Culpable ignorance depends on the self-relexivity of rationality (Section 5.2).

Building on ideas experimentally developed in revolutionary practice and elaborated in the works of Hannah Arendt, Cornelius Castoriadis, and others, this chapter develops the contours of a new – grounded and pluralist – understanding of revolution that does not subordinate the radical democratic practices in the “here and now” to some future project, but, rather, grounds revolution precisely in this “here and now”. The radical-democratic potential of revolution, which is evidenced in contemporary movements and struggles of migrants and indigenous peoples, is tied to its internal heterogeneity and ambivalence that needs to be preserved against the urge of homogenizing its subject, its practices, its aims and its trajectories. As the chapter argues, it is precisely the revolutionary and democratic potential of the apparently marginal – as exemplified, amongst others, in the struggles of migrants and indigenous peoples today – that allows us to see that revolutionary practices are essentially practices of enacting radical democracy “here and now”.

Recent studies in environmental psychology have shown how acts of perspective-taking can increase empathy in participants, leading to a ‘green nudge’ effect in relation to climate change. Similar proposals recur in ecocritical approaches to climate change fiction, influenced by long-standing arguments on fiction’s capacity to improve ‘theory of mind’. To further understand, but also to problematise and thus develop, these discussions of perspective-taking, I identify the parallels between these claims and those concerning virtual reality (VR) as an ‘empathy machine’, as well as those counter-claims regarding VR as an ‘appropriation machine’ that commodifies the experience of others. Jorie Graham’s poetry collection Fast (2017) explores the possibilities and difficulties of generating environmental empathy via material and simulated means, the latter inclusive of both textual and digital forms. In my analysis, I show how Graham generates a deliberately unstable and unreliable perspective-taking process with regard to human and non-human others. Consequently, I argue that her poems contribute a crucial interpretation of perspective-taking as a provisional act that at once reveals our strong human desire to connect with others, as well as our (potentially inevitable) inability to do so.

This chapter starts by asking ‘What is in a Thing?’ It discusses the material presence of the past and its rediscovery, for example, in the history of commodities. Material culture history, it argues, has been critical of the linguistic turn but is still building on insights from it. It proposes that objects provide an ‘order of things’ (Michel Foucault), which is in need of examination and contextualisation. At the same time material culture history has also been in the vanguard of decentring human agency and problematising the ‘Anthropocene’. Using non-representational theory, it has been arguing in favour of recognising the agency of things and decentring human agency in history. Material culture history has also been pointing to the longevity of material objects, providing them with often malleable and multiple meanings. It is striking how prominent everyday objects are in material culture histories. Through them individual identities are often related to larger collective identities. Historians of material culture have contributed to raising our awareness of the link between objects and collective identity formation. Examples from national history, environmental history, first nations hsitory, the history of ethnic minorities, colonial history, cultural history, design history, architectural history, regional history, class history, gender history and religious history are all discussed in oder to underline the potential of material culture history to lead to greater self-reflexivity among historians about their role in constructing forms of collective identity and to deconstruct these identities.

This concluding chapter argues that current ideas about post-narrativism and post-representationalism still build on narrativism and representationalism rather than rejecting them. They do so in particular in their radical move away from grand narratives that are associated with the construction of collective identities. Yet, as the previous chapters have shown, this position can go hand in hand with maintaining that historical writing can and should amount to an intervention in the social world and that it is meaningful for directing and informing a variety of democratic policy agendas. It is historical writing that keeps the future open and makes us suspicious of all attempts to declare an end to history. The ‘new’ histories that have been emerging over recent decades and which have been the subject of analysis in this book often see identification in the definition by Stuart Hall as the basis for their social intervention. They contributed to a growing self-reflexivity about the relationship of historical writing and collective identity formation and they have often taken their starting point from a body of highly diverse theories that have been discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume. The chapter recaps the arguments of the previous eleven chapters of the book and finishes with a reflection on how the struggle over and with history will continue in the future. Denying the existence of any whiggish progressivism, it charts the well-known fact that professional historians’ greater reluctance to commit to the construction of essentialised collective identities has gone hand in hand with the willingness of ‘amateur historiansߣ to do precisely that. This in turn has made it increasingly necessary for professional historians not to retreat to their ivory towers but engage with all essentialised forms of identity history. They need to become engaged and public historians who continue an ongoing struggle over the past in all human societies.

This chapter looks at the spread of global history globally and the abandonment of historiographical nationalism. It examines the long practice of comparative, transnational and global history writing since the Enlightenments. It also looks at the construction of peculiarities and exceptionalisms through comparison as well as their critique. It distinguishes between comparative and global history and links the rise of both to the renewed crisis of historicism since the 1980s. It also discusses the controvery between comparative historians and historians of cultural transfer, arguing that both approaches need to be united. The chapter highlights the idea of circulations and examines the explosion of global history around particular themes. It also underlines its usefulness in overcoming Western-centric models of development and questioning universalisms. Transnational, comparative and global histories have all contributed to decentring collective identity constructions and making historians more aware of the ways in which historical writing has been connected to the construction of such collective identities. This is shown in relation to spatial boundaries, be they national or supra-national, but also in relation to class, racial and gender identities. Postcolonial perspectives on global history have been particularly adept at questioning the Western-centrism of historical writing and understanding diverse regimes of colonialism. It has also made transnational global history more aware of its own temptation to further global identities.

This chapter begins by summarising the development of the history of ideas out of which conceptual history emerged. It discusses in detail the founding figure of conceptual history, Reinhart Koselleck, and compares his approach to that of the influential Cambridge school, in particular Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, and their ‘contextualism’. The bulk of the chapter is then dedicated to a discussion of a range of examples of how conceptual histories have helped to deconstruct a rainge of collective identities, including class, religious, racial and gender identities. In all of these areas we have seen an intense interest in linking the history of conceps with the study of emotions, social practices and the problematisation of the national container for historical studies. In particular the move to a transnational history of concepts has contributed in a major way to de-essentialising collective national identities but also transnational, i.e. European ones. Furthermore, conceptual history has been emphasising the importance of studying the translation of concepts into different languages and cultural spheres.

This chapter traces the emergence of the field of memory studies and assesses the historians’ contribution to this field. In particular the influential work of Pierre Nora is discussed here. Memory history, it argues, has moved from underpinning national historical master narratives to promoting transnational cosmopolitan forms of memory that in turn have produced greater self-reflexivity about the relationship between historical writing and collective identity formation and helped to de-essentialise collective identities. The chapter introduces and analyses a range of different memory debates that all, in their different ways, have helped to de-essentialise the construction of collective identities: memory debates surrounding communism, the Holocaust, Brexit, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa are all discussed in this respect. The chapter also introduces the concept of ‘agonistic memory’ and discusses how it may help to repoliticise memory and contribute to greater self-reflexivity about the construction of memory and the shaping of collective identities.

This chapter offers a a brief survey of Mailer’s ongoing artistic responses and reactions to the postmodern period. Mailer is indebted to his Modernist predecessors but also experiments with perspective and structure in a way that aligns him more closely with definitions of Postmodernism. While this is most evident in his avant-garde films, it is also apparent in the self-referential nature and thematic focus of his nonfiction, as well as in his preoccupation with notions of metamorphosis.

This chapter argues that the postwar nouveau roman is more than an avant-garde experiment in novel form. The movement must also be understood as the product of a particular publishing house (Les Editions de Minuit) and as an aesthetic phenomenon that registers historical trauma, despite its apparent withdrawal from the social. Special attention is paid to convergences and divergences among authors, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Michel Butor, Robert Pinget, Claude Simon, and Samuel Beckett.

The chapter’s first part describes the interrelated but also contrary development of literature and film in the early twentieth century. It places modernist experiments with literary form in relation to the new representational and narrative strategies of early film. The second part explains in depth which new forms of immediacy the movies offered and how important these immediacy effects were for the cultural impact and popularity of early film, especially the “cinema of attractions.” The chapter also discusses the popular perception of film as a particularly modern medium. It argues that the oscillation between self-reflexivity and immediacy was central to the cultural work performed by early cinema because it allowed early film to train viewers in new forms of attention required by the accelerated pace, fragmentation, and informational density of modern life, while also providing compensatory relief and entertainment. Provoking media awareness as well as experiences of immersion, the early cinema reminded its viewers that their perception of the world was mediated, while the thrill of its immediacy effects offered them moments of respite from such self-reflexive considerations.

Stein used film as a model to explain the avant-garde poetics of her literary portraits to her perplexed readers. The chapter examines two early portraits, “Picasso” and “Orta,” in the context of chronophotography and early film. It also considers Stein’s theoretical reflections on her insistent style, particularly “Portraits and Repetition” and “How Writing Is Written.” Stein’s early portraits are in orientation temporal and performative (like film) rather than visual and static (like photography). They advance through sequences of similar, serially varied sentences that create the impression of an ongoing present. Stein’s cinematic form of serial variation locates meaning in the movement of its sentence permutations rather than in its mimetic capacities. Her serial sentences keep readers focused on the workings of language and the text’s temporal unfolding and thus manage to turn an awareness of representational processes into a tool to center our attention on the always elusive present moment. Stein’s use of self-reflexivity to create a sense of temporal and perceptual immediacy radicalizes the cinematic strategy of embedding immediacy effects in overtly self-referential texts.

Ian McEwan claimed in 1978 that the ‘artifice of fiction can be taken for granted’, implying that the avant-garde experimentalism of the postwar era had run its course and that, going forward, writers ought not to fall into the trap of producing ‘self-enclosed “fictions”’ about the nature of fictionality. This chapter examines the ways in which this early stance changed quite considerably over time, as McEwan evolved into a socially engaged novelist of ideas who also uses fiction to deliberate in explicitly self-conscious terms on the history and ethical valences of literary form. Realism and innovation have never been opposed in his work, just as his fiction has inhabited only to refurbish numerous genre models – among them, espionage, the psychological thriller, period romance and topical satire. Lodestones for this chapter will include The Child in Time, Atonement, Saturday and Nutshell.