2. 职称英语
  3. Traditionally, the study of history has had fixed boundaries and focal point

Traditionally, the study of history has had fixed boundaries and focal point

游客2025-04-03  4
问题     Traditionally, the study of history has had fixed boundaries and focal points—periods, countries, dramatic events, and great leaders. It also has had clear and firm notions of scholarly procedure; how one inquires into a historical problem, how one presents and documents one’s findings, what constitutes admissible and adequate proof.
    Anyone who has followed recent historical literature can testify to the revolution that is taking place in historical studies. The currently fashionable subjects come directly from the sociology catalog: childhood, work, leisure. The new subjects are accompanied by new methods. Where history once was primarily narrative, it is now entirely analytic. The old questions "What happened?" and "How did it happen?" have given way to the question "Why did it happen?" Prominent among the methods used to answer the question "Why" is psychoanalysis, and its use has given rise to psychohistory.
    Psychohistory does not merely use psychological explanations in historical contexts. Historians have always used such explanations when they were appropriate and when there was sufficient evidence for them. But this pragmatic use of psychology is not what psychohistorians intend. They are committed, not just to psychology in general, but to Freudian psychoanalysis. This commitment precludes a commitment to history as historians have always understood it. Psychohistory derives its "facts" not from history, the detailed records of events and their consequences, but from psychoanalysis of the individuals who made history, and deduces its theories not from this or that instance in their lives, but from a view of human nature that transcends history. It denies the basic criterion of historical evidence; that evidence be publicly accessible to, and therefore assessable by, all historians. And it violates the basic tenet of historical method: that historians be alert to the negative instances that would refute their theses. Psychohistorians, convinced of the absolute lightness of their own theories, are also convinced that theirs is the "deepest" explanation of any event, that other explanations fall short of the truth.
    Psychohistory is not content to violate the discipline of history(in the sense of the proper mode of studying and writing about the past); it also violates the past itself. It denies to the past an integrity and will of its own, in which people acted out of a variety of motives and in which events had a multiplicity of causes and effects. It imposes upon the past the same determinism that it imposes upon the present, thus robbing people and events of their individuality and of their complexity. Instead of respecting the particularity of the past, it assimilates all events, past and present, into a single deterministic schema that is presumed to be true at all times and in all circumstances. [br] In presenting her analysis, the author does all of the following EXCEPT______.
选项 A、Make general statements without reference to specific examples
B、Describe some of the criteria employed by traditional historians
C、Question the adequacy of the psychohistorians’ interpretation of events
D、Point out inconsistencies in the psychohistorians’ application of their methods
答案 D
解析 本题是写作手法题。本题A、B、C中所涉及的内容可分别在第三段第六、七、八句、第一段的第一、二句以及第三段的尾句找到。本文并没有谈到“psychohistorians”在应用自己方法方面的前后矛盾不一致性，故本题的正确选项应该是选项D。
转载请注明原文地址:https://www.tihaiku.com/zcyy/4024168.html
相关试题推荐
随机试题
最新回复(0)