9 - History in the Arts: Exploring the Past to Cultivate Students’ Gaze

Summary

This chapter aims to advance the exploration of history beyond SFL’s traditional understanding of it as a school subject. The chapter studies the role of history as part of a disciplinary domain in the humanities, addressing how it contributes to ‘cultivating the artist’ in a bachelor’s degree in Creative Arts in a Chilean university. This study integrates recent developments in systemic theory, particularly in relation to the discourse-semantics stratum. These developments offer interesting tools for examining history with a focus on genre, register, and discourse-semantics (Hao, 2020; Doran & Martin, 2021). The chapter analyses students’ writing at the initial stage of their curriculum, with the aim of identifying the nature of the historical genres that are emerging and their role in cultivating students’ gaze as artists-in-training. The chapter describes historical recounts through a metafunctionally diverse exploration of discourse semantic patterns in texts. This exploration contributes to providing an initial response to the questions what is history as a disciplinary domain? Is there something like ‘the history’, as a monolithic and single discipline?