Clio’s Laws: On History and Language – eBook

Clio’s Laws, (PDF) provides a unique perspective on the very notions and practices of storytelling, history, memory, and language, and gathers ten essays (some new and some earlier published in Spanish) by a respected voice in global history. Taking its name from the Greek muse of history, this piece considers issues related to the historian’s craft, including identity and nationalism. It draws on Tenorio-Trillo’s own lifetime of experiences as a historian with deep roots in both Mexico and the US. By turns deeply provocative, ironic, and experimental, and including lowbrow topics, the essays form a dialogue with Clio about idiosyncratic yet deep matters.

Tenorio-Trillo portrays his own version of an ars historica (what history is, why we write it, and how we abuse it) with a personal essay on the relationship between poetry and history. Other selections include a study of the effects of a historian’s autobiography, a critique of history’s special obsession, and a guide to reading history in an age of internet searches and too many books. A self-described exile, Tenorio-Trillo has given a singular tour of the historical imagination and its universal traits.

Reviews

Clio’s Laws includes a fresh depiction of the way history is now conceived and written, far removed from the inflexible canons established by its historicist founders…A whole collection of historical figures, professional historians, and literary authors file past throughout the ebook, hugely enhancing what could have been reduced to a general survey of the most important ideas on the relationship between language and history….Clio’s Laws is unquestionably a valuable and original contribution to the field of historiography and historical-literary criticism, in addition to Latin American studies. ― Journal of the Philosophy of History

An unconventional assortment of writings that play, mostly in an irreverent and ironic mode, with the transnational topoi of Latin Americanist historiography as the author has lived and performed them over his distinguished career trajectory from Mexico to Barcelona and Chicago…the turnings of living, translating, and publishing between one or another manner of Spanish and English…stimulates the entire collection and may be taken to be its primary insight. ― Hispanic American Historical Review

 NOTE: The product only includes the ebook, Clio’s Laws: On History and Language in PDF. No access codes are included.