Evidence, clues and trifles. Microhistory seminar II, Oslo
Microhistory is key to Provenance Projected: Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity. Across three reading seminars, we will discuss some foundational contributions, a few more recent texts with microhistorical implications, as well as a 1951 detective novel.
The seminar highlights methodological, theoretical and historiographical aspects of a five-decade academic tradition, and its relevance for the writing of contemporary architectural history.
PROGRAM
October 27
Mari Lending: Microhistory today, Introduction
Mari Hvattum: Carlo Ginzburg, “Preface to the Italian Edition,” in The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller [1976], trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)
Mari Lending: Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method” [“Crisi della ragione,” 1979], History Workshop Journal, vol. 9, no.1 (spring 1980)
Victor Plahte Tschudi: Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, “The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Historiographical Marketplace,” in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, ed. Edward Muir&Guido Ruggiero, trans. Eren Branch (Johns Hopkins UP, 1991)
November 3 (3 hours)
Alena Rieger: Ben Kafka, “The Disciplined State,” in The Demon of Writing. Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York: Zone Books, 2012)
Jenny Trømborg: Daniel Arasse, “Paint it Black,” in Take a Closer Look [On n’y voir rien: Descriptions, 2000], trans. Alyson Waters (Princeton UP, 2013)
Presentations, microhistory work:
Ingrid Roede: “The Process”
Jørgen Tandberg: “The stones of NRK”
Erik Langdalen: “Høvikodden: A fragment”
November 10 (1 hour + drinks elsewhere)
Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (London: Peter Davies, 1951)
We will all read different, later editions
Recommeded: The Lost King (dir. Stephen Frears, 2022)
