Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity

By J. Scott. Critical Inquiry, 2001

221 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The title of this paper is not a technical term. In origin it was a mistake, the result of a student's inability to understand some French words spoken in heavily accented English by a German-born professor of history. The student, who also had no familiarity with some of the grand themes of modern European intellectual history, tried to capture the sounds he had heard and render them phonetically, echoing imperfectly, though not unrecognizably, the professor's reference to the designation by contemporaries of the last decades of the nineteenth century as the fin de siecle. There were enough clues in the student's final exam for me eventually to figure out what he meant. (I was a teaching assistant for George Mosse at the University of Wisconsin then-it was 1964 or 1965). There was something about the student's choice of words that appealed to meperhaps their sheer linguistic creativity or perhaps the fact that they

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d79499f99bd7952e90e6fadf64b9ae36a336aa55