ABSTRACT
It’s easy enough to theorise in abstract terms, so let’s look here at four specific and practical examples that seem to me to satisfy the criteria I’ve set for histories in and for postmodernity.
1 Robert A. Rosenstone and Japan
By some happy chance, I had no sooner formulated for myself the personal qualities that seem currently to be particularly needed, and to be such as historical study might well foster (i.e. self-reflexivity, linguistic awareness, and tolerance of ambiguity), than I was introduced to a work that actually exemplifies all three. Robert Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan was published in 1988 but, immersed as I then was in seventeenth-century intellectual history, I missed its then seemingly (to me, as I then was) irrelevant appearance. But it seems to me now to be concerned with just the three qualities about which I’ve been writing – and to be itself a wonderful vehicle for teaching them.
