History as a dialogic process: the case of Frank Lloyd Wright

This theoretical essay elaborates an approach to historiography using dialogic concepts to construct histories, noting that some utterances are more important than others depending on context and continuously open to revision; as Bakhtin argued, there is “no final word.” My analysis elaborates the role of re-enlightenments, which I define as cognitive, historical, personal, and cultural transformations of understandings replacing old with new. In this scheme, re-enlightenments function as keystones celebrating events, which demarcate and shape both downstreams and upstreams. Downstreams concern the consequences of re-enlightenments, including the impetus to construct histories. Upstreams are about the foundational events that are said to memorialize the event. Dialogically histories are generated in these upstreams; they may be identified/selected downstream as noteworthy events in the past, but their selection and treatment occurs upstream after the fact. A case study follows tracing the re-enlightenment of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright from Oak Park (Illinois, USA)'s bête noir to recognition as America's greatest architect, not as chapters of a career but rather a sequence of competing narratives