RHETOR 103B Chapter Notes - Chapter 11: Frame Story, Herbert Gutman
Document Summary
Herbert gutman: essential task of humanist intellectual is to determine not what one has done to man, but what man does with what one has done to him. Marx: men make history under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. Interest in contrasting these two views through reconsidering the master trope of the new social history: agency. Argument of nsm: social historians are tasked with giving agency back to the slaves. This common way to frame an argument under sign of agency is to emphasize that enslaved people strove to preserve their humanity. As a consequence, actions are emptied of specific meaning beyond the bounded terms of the speaker"s definition of humanity. Personal meaning, political meaning, cultural meaning, metaphysical meaning are all emptied. Argument of johnson humanity/ agency circuit formulated enslaved people"s actions in too abstract of a manner.
