Proceedings of the 8th World Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities
Year: 2025
DOI:
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Backyards of His-story: Rewriting and Reconsidering the Past
Fatma Melıke Alsac
ABSTRACT:
Have you ever considered that history might be nothing more than a fictional construct? The way we perceive and represent history is shaped not only by individual viewpoints but also by cultural backgrounds. A single historical event will never be recounted in the same way by two witnesses. In the end, our understanding of the world is limited to narratives. As Linda Hutcheon posits, “the present, the past, is always already irremediably textualized for us.” This realization brings us to the concept of historiographic metafiction, a postmodern approach that Hutcheon describes as an ironic acknowledgment that history is not an objective record of indisputable truths. Far from undermining the past, historiographic metafiction employs parody to deconstruct and question established ideologies, presenting history from multiple perspectives through fragmented and nonlinear narratives. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five serves as a powerful example of historiographic metafiction, utilizing an unreliable narrator and a nonlinear narrative to challenge traditional historical accounts. Through its parodic references to historical events and its ironic allusions to the major milestones of human history, Vonnegut’s work creates a grotesque effect, forcing the reader to confront the fluidity of truth. Aware that no singular explanation can encapsulate human existence or history, Vonnegut suggests that both must be constantly rewritten and reconsidered. This paper seeks to explore the defining features of historiographic metafiction in Slaughterhouse-Five, drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s theories to examine how postmodernism reshapes our understanding of the past.
keywords: Historiographic metafiction, Postmodernism, Deconstruction, Fiction, History