Narration, realism and authorship in History and in the novel

Abstract

The present article intends to represent a process of rereading, rewriting, reusing and reflecting about certain contemporary novel and historiography authors. In common, these novelists and historians have a way of writing that emphasizes the act of writing itself (or their own act of writing) and, therefore, put their narrators in another discourse position when considering both the realist aesthetic and the historiographycal rhetoric. By textual procedures that describe and simulate acts of drafting, erasing, rewriting, revising, rebuting, and reopening, the authors in question put themselves into the text, questioning and reformulating not only the so called formal realism from the 18th century but also the historical research and its empirical method linked to the 19th century – both schools that survived and thrived for the last hundred years. In writing this article – reading, analyzing and rereading these authors – we could reflect on how academic texts are written.