A Conversation with Peter Coviello

Abstract

With Jared Hickman, he co-edited a 2014 special issue of American Literature entitled "After the Postsecular." 2 Hélène Quanquin and Cécile Roudeau: Our research group has been questioning the frontier between history and literature in the wake of recent works by French scholars, among whom, in particular, Ivan Jablonka's L'Histoire est une littérature contemporaine: Manifeste pour les sciences sociales[History As Contemporary Literature: A Manifesto for Social Sciences](2014). In this book, which follows and should be read as a more personal counterpart to a previous book of "memoirs" about his grandparents who died in Nazi camps, Histoire de ces grands-parents que je n'ai jamais eus [(Hi)story of Those Grandparents I've Never Had] (2012), Jablonka reflects on his own practice as both historian and writer. Jablonka's way of writing may be described as reflexive in two senses: because it is an autobiographical text, and also in the sense that the author is highly aware of the power of literariness, more specifically of literary fiction, to invent the "true" lives of those grandparents he never met. Jablonka's diptych can be considered as a methodological manifesto exhorting us to stop thinking (and doing) inside the disciplinary boxes of "history" and "literature." It encourages historians to acknowledge that fiction and literariness are constitutive of their practice. Ultimately, it aims for what Jablonka calls "creative history" (L'Histoire est une