issue110[AWER小组]第五次作业

lw19851028UID: 2438560

Issue 110 "When we concern ourselves with the study of history, we become storytellers. Because we can never know the past directly but must construct it by interpreting evidence, exploring history is more of a creative enterprise than it is an objective pursuit. All historians are storytellers."
当我们通过研究历史来考虑自身问题的时候,我们就会变成说故事的人.因为我们不可能直接了解过去,只有通过解释一些史料来构造历史,所以探索历史更多是一件创造性的事业而不是客观的追寻.所有的历史学家都是讲故事的人.


Indisputably, we can never know exactly how the past like since we cannot get all details or get back to experience it. For this reason, historians, whose work is to tell people what was going on in the past, have to construct history；In other words, creative work is part of historians’ job. With this regard, what a historian does is resemble the work of a storyteller’s, however, it is unfair to regard historians as storytellers because historian's discoveries or speculations of history are base on facts, while a storyteller invent facts to support his viewpoint. In my point of view, historians and storytellers are fundamentally different.
  
Admittedly, lack of evidence is the most troublesome thing faced with historians. Thus, the first step for a historian who dedicated to rebuild history is to find more evidences, which includes records in history books, remains and artifacts of ancient cities, ancient language and so forth. Basing on the evidence he get, a historian starts his work of rebuilding history by means of analyzing the casual relationship between facts, their conclusion must match with the evidence accurately. Then people who think historians as storytellers may argue that this process of rebuild history is just like we can only identify few points of a curve, but we have to find the logical relationship between these points to get the real shape of line, as we know, though limited points one cannot get an accurate shape of the line, thus, it is impossible for historians to reach the truth. From this angle, people can say that historians are storytellers, whose plot usually did not really happen and either exaggerate or distort the truth.

After deeper contemplation, however, just like the curve, which is smooth, history change slowly and each pieces of evidence have logical relations with others, consequently, if we can get more points or more evidence for historians, we can get a line very close to its real shape and historians can rely on limited facts to rebuild the whole picture of history which is approximate to the truth. The ability of extrapolation and conjecture of a historian play an important role on the degree of approximation to the truth. An experienced historian can rebuild the history very well.
   
Furthermore, historians and storytellers are different in the following two respects. AT first, the process of a historian to rebuild the history is bottom-up, which means that facts is the basis and through these facts to extrapolate scene in history, but the first step of a storyteller is thinking about what he want to conceive in the story and then develops stories to support his point, in other words, his work is top-down. Another fact lends support to my viewpoint is that historians respect facts while storytellers don’t, when historians are opposed by others, he will find another facts to support his point, while a storyteller just pursuit the logically feasible of the conclusion, he cannot provide any evidence to support his opinion and don’t care about facts.

From foregoing analysis, historians’ work composes of both creative work and objective pursuit, and the latter is more important for a historian, while storytellers only concentrate on creative work.
  
In the final analysis, I concede that historians and storytellers have something in common such as both of them need imagination and conjecture and the conclusion might do not actually true, but there are many respects on which historians distinguish them from storytellers, for example, their attitude to facts are different and the process of their imaginary work is fundamentally different. Thus, we cannot equate historians as storytellers.





[ 本帖最后由 lw19851028 于 2008-1-11 17:11 编辑 ]

陈星君UID: 2416582

Issue 110 "When we concern ourselves with the study of history, we become storytellers. Because we can never know the past directly but must construct it by interpreting evidence, exploring history is more of a creative enterprise than it is an objective pursuit. All historians are storytellers."
当我们通过研究历史来考虑自身问题的时候,我们就会变成说故事的人.因为我们不可能直接了解过去,只有通过解释一些史料来构造历史,所以探索历史更多是一件创造性的事业而不是客观的追寻.所有的历史学家都是讲故事的人.

Indisputably, we can never know exactly how the past like since that[去that] we cannot get all details or get back to experience it. For this reason, historians, whose work is to tell people what was going on in the past, have to construct history.  To certain extent, what a historian does is resemble the work of a storyteller’s, however, it is unfair to regard historians as storytellers because historian's discoveries or speculations of history are base[d] on facts, while a storyteller invent[不是发明而是创造,] facts to support his viewpoint. In my point of view, historians and storytellers are fundamentally different.
  `
Admittedly, lack of evidence is the most troublesome thing faced with historians. Thus, the first step for a historian who dedicated to rebuild history is to find more evidences, which includes[去s] records in history books, remains and artifacts of ancient cities, ancient language and so forth. Basing on the evidence he get, a historian starts his work of rebuilding history by means of analyzing the casual relationship between facts,their conclusion must match with the evidence accurately. Then people who think historians as storytellers may argue that this process of rebuild history is just like we can only identify few points of a curve, but we have to find the logical relationship between these points to get the real shape of line, as we know, though limited points one cannot get an accurate shape of the line, thus, it is impossible for historians to reach the truth. From this angle,people can say that historians are storytellers. After deeper contemplation, just like the curve, which is smooth, history change slowly and each pieces of evidence have logical relations with others, consequently, if we can get more points or more evidence for historians, we can get a line very close to its real shape and historians can rely on limited facts to rebuild the whole picture of history which is approximate to the truth. The ability of extrapolation and conjecture of a historian play an important role on the degree of approximation to the truth. An experienced historian can rebuild the history very well. From this point, a historian is not simply a storyteller.
  
Detractors may argue that evidences which historians rely on are always fallacious. For example, many records are folklores which are mainly imaginary works of the public and did not actually happened. History is full of much folklore which is fabricated by people end up with exaggerating the truth. But many historians still use them as evidences which are unreliable. I want to say that although these stories may did not really happen, it does reflect the character of certain society of person. Thus, relying on these records could not make the conclusion distort history.
  
Other opponents may argue that many records which we regard authentic perhaps distort the history, because historians in certain times have to obey the will of potentates, they did not dare to write down those truths which may bring negative effect to potentates and may even fabricate a good deed to please them. History is full with many of this kind of things. From this point, conclusion relying on them is unreliable. But I will argue that this kind of records is rare and many of them are picked out.
   
Furthermore, historians and storytellers are different in the follow respects. AT[At] first, the process of a historian to rebuild the history is bottom-up, which means that facts is the basis and through these facts to extrapolate scene in history, but the first step of a storyteller is thinking about what he want to conceive in the story and then invent examples or stories to support his point, in other words, his work is top-down.  Another fact lends support to my viewpoint is that historians respect facts while storytellers don’t, when historians are opposed by others, he will find another facts to support his point, while a storyteller just pursuit the logically feasible of the conclusion, he cannot provide any evidence to support his opinion and don’t care about facts. From this point, they are different in essence.
  
In the final analysis, I concede that historians and storytellers have something in common such as both of them need imagination and conjecture and the conclusion might do not actually true, but there are many respects on which historians distinguish them from storytellers, for example, their attitude to facts are different and the process of their imaginary work is fundamentally different. Thus, we cannot equate historians as storytellers.


呵呵,写得很不错.
向你学习学习.

ICEYOUNGUID: 2437642

我的看法很不同
我觉得这篇文章审题有问题，这个题目是问对待historians 的工作的态度， exploring history 是
a creative enterprise   还是an objective pursuit
并不是要拿historians 和storytellers做比较的，侧重点在于historians
所以我觉得作者切题有问题，
也正是基于此，中间四段逻辑混乱，这四段彼此之间没有什么密切联系
虽然写得很多，但很烂，个人见解了

lw19851028UID: 2438560

首先感谢你的批评指正。
这篇文章我写了一个多小时就写了四百多字，后来改了好长时间加了些内容，自己也感觉很乱的。
但我不同意你所说的

这个题目是问对待historians 的工作的态度， exploring history 是
a creative enterprise   还是an objective pursuit
并不是要拿historians 和storytellers做比较的，侧重点在于historians

题目的观点就是说historians 和storytellers一样，because的内容只是作者为了支持自己的观点的理由，所以重点应该还是在historians 和storytellers是否一样上。

[ 本帖最后由 lw19851028 于 2008-1-9 10:54 编辑 ]