The couse will start and end with Paul Veyne's book on Writing History. In many ways the book is a reaction to the scientistic claims of the social sciences. Veyne unapologetically opposes the literary character of history. Levi-Strauss' Savage Mind is one of the seminal texts in modern historiography. L-S juxtaposes myth and history, critiquing the latter on formal and epistemological grounds.
Myth deals with the same problems as history, but in another way.
Not only does this book outline an alternative to history, it also attempts to rehabilitate mythological thought from the modern western tendency to dismiss it as primitive and child-like. Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism. Here we will be chiefly interested in what Freud has to say about the origins of a sense of the authority of the past and the relation of this authority to the compulsion to speak. Collingwood has of course been for generations a standard historians' handbook for the philosophy of history. He is generally good on many of the major issues which arise from a narratological critique of history.