From History to Theory by Kerwin Lee Klein (review)

“Welcome to the memory industry” are the opening words of Kerwin Lee Klein’s essay “On the Emergence of Memory in the Historical Discourse,” included in his latest collection From History to Theory (112). It is an ironic opening as ringmaster Klein invites us to a circus which he feels is not an unqualified success. The essay, an earlier version of which appeared in Representations (v. 69, Winter 2000, pp. 127–50), reveals a skepticism about memory discourse that might not be unfamiliar to many oral historians. As Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes have pointed out, oral history and memory studies have not always gotten along, even though there would be a lot to be gained from an interdisciplinary partnership (Oral History and Public Memories, Philadelphia: Temple, 2008). Klein’s observation (that whereas we once spoke of “folk history” or “public history” or “oral history,” we now employ “memory” as an umbrella term) is encouraging (113). Will the essay offer a thorough analysis of the relationship between the burgeoning memory studies and the by-now established fields of oral, folk, and public history?

The essay on memory is one of six chapters that comprise a book described by its author as “an episodic history of history and theory in the twentieth century” (5). To understand the presuppositions of the essay and then to establish what its argument can mean for current oral history research, it is vital to look at what kind of book From History to Theory is. First, the volume is a transdisciplinary effort to trace genealogies of especially important discursive moments in academic history in the twentieth century. Kerwin Lee Klein, now professor of history at the University of California–Berkeley, has spent almost a decade being socialized into different academic traditions, and this bit of autobiography goes a long way to situate the origins of a book in which history and historiography team up with (ethno)linguistics.

Second, the collection is deeply rooted in American academic traditions. Klein’s focus is upon English usage in the North American academic world. The central argument that ties together the volume is that the standard story of historiography—i.e., that the decisive moments are nothing more than paradigm shifts out of the darkness of positivism, via linguistic radicalism, into the light of postmodernism—should be more nuanced and that “the conditions of possibility for these changes emerged out of earlier developments in historical and linguistic discourse in North America” (12). Even while Klein is writing about American scholarly discourse primarily for an American audience and tries to counter the traditional continental focus, we cannot accuse him of writing from an isolated, U.S.-centered or teleological point of view. His argument is more subtle; instead of claiming that earlier North American debates on language were the “real” source of, for instance, deconstruction or postmodernism, he contends that what we have sometimes taken as French debates were debates already “decorated with American idioms” (12).

Third, From History to Theory is influenced by a number of philosophical precursors. The book is, among others, indebted to Raymond Williams, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and the German Begriffsgeschichte project that, from the 1970s until the early twenty-first century, aimed to give an overview of the most important concepts used and studied in the history of the humanities. At the same time, Klein does not claim to write a history of concepts but rather takes the term “keyword” “as a useful label for words that do more abstracting and generalizing work than others” (10). This does not result in a metahistorical lexicon but in carefully composed, yet loosely written, essays that each map out a keyword. The first chapter, for example, describes the rise and fall of the “unlovely” word “historiography,” from its earliest English usages, to its 1950s association with both a new type of intellectual history and the training of new historians, to its becoming outdated in the 1970s (20). The...