Why is it that when we learn a difficult new concept, we often initially react with resistance? Rather than being exhilarated by the imminent expansion of our intellectual horizons, we often respond to these new concepts with fear, doubt and discouragement. In fact, it seems that learning a new and complex idea causes us to go through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ now infamous five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
I have recently started to study historical theory in one of my classes, and I can say unequivocally that it is the hardest and most complicated concept I have ever tackled in my life. Theory is for humanities majors what organic chemistry is for science majors: incredibly complicated, occasionally tiresome to study and often the bane of our academic existence. The study of historical theory, just as with many new and complicated ideas, resulted in the death of previous ideas I had held about how history worked — and it was then that I realized I was grieving the loss of my simplistic and superficial understanding of my field.
First, there was denial. There is always denial. There is the urge to hurl your textbook against the wall, or tear its pages out and burn them, or feed them to your dog. There is the procrastination that results in the realization that you have to face these impossibly convoluted concepts sooner or later — but only after dinner, and watching TV, and checking Facebook, and scrubbing your floors with a toothbrush.
But the problem with the five stages of grief is that one stage inevitably leads to another, and in this case, denial leads directly to anger. We scream at the authors of the textbook for writing such indecipherable garbage in the hopes that they can somehow hear our rage. We become livid at our teachers for assigning something we cannot possibly hope to understand (not to mention that the reading is too long, and the print is too small, and did we mention that it’s boring as spit?). We whine to our friends, our parents, our other teachers, and even to our dog, whose offer to eat the book probably still stands.
And as the looming deadline approaches, we resort to the third stage: bargaining. This stage, while maybe the strangest stage when applied to actual grief (I mean, is giving up chocolate really going to bring Spot back?), is probably the one that students wrestling with hard material spend the most time experiencing. Our first targets, of course, are our poor professors, who have read this stuff in graduate school so much that they could probably recite it back to you in Pig Latin. We beg for more time, or for the amount of reading to be cut down, or for a study guide, or to simply not learn this weird stuff at all and just talk about “Downton Abbey” instead (it is a historical show, after all). Failing that, we bargain with our friends to do the reading for us, or to distract us from having to do it. We even bargain with the dog, who honestly didn’t need convincing in the first place.
Ultimately, though, we must face the fact that these new, complicated ideas are not going away, and that they force us to change the way we have thought about things for years. Studying historical theory made me realize that history was much more than recounting facts and events: It must take into account the historian’s perceptions of the past, the way people in the past behaved, and how you determine the factors that caused the events you are writing about. Realizing how wrong you’ve been causes the fourth stage of depression, because honestly, who is overjoyed to learn that they have to rethink just about everything they knew?
The fifth stage, of course, is acceptance, the stage that is the result of actually buckling down and trying to wrestle with these ideas once you realize you can’t escape them. For me, it involved looking up every other word in my readings, but once I did, I could start to piece together what historical theory was trying to say. I realized it wasn’t in opposition to my previous understanding of history, but actually complemented it and elaborated upon it. My old perceptions hadn’t really died; they had just been reincarnated as bigger and better. My initial resistance proved futile, but ultimately yielded in a more nuanced — and exciting — idea of history.
— Sarah Russell is a senior in history. She can be reached at srusse22@utk.edu.
