Hayden White, a historian operating within the tradition of literary criticism, is renowned for his seminal work on historical imagination. He meticulously analyzed the narratives of 19th and 20th-century historians and philosophers, proposing that historical discourse is a form of fiction classifiable by its structure and linguistic use. White challenged the notion of objective historical accounts, arguing that historians employ unarticulated assumptions in selecting and interpreting events. His work fundamentally altered the theory of history by applying rhetorical tropes to narrative discourse, revealing deeper insights into authorial attitudes and historical contexts.
The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
In White's view, beyond the surface level of the historical text, there is a deep structural, or latent, content that is generally poetic and specifically linguistic in nature. This deeper content - the metahistorical element - indicates what an appropriate historical explanation should be.
The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in the content of the form,in the way our narrative capacities transform the present into a fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have descended.
The Fiction of Narrative traces the arc and evolution of White's field- defining thought and will become standard reading for students and scholars of historiography, the theory of history, and literary studies.
Tropics of Discourse develops White's ideas on interpretation in history, on the relationship between history and the novel, and on history and historicism. Vico, Croce, Derrida, and Foucault are among the figures he assesses in this work, which also offers original interpretations of a number of literary themes, including the Wild Man and the Noble Savage. White's commentary ranges from a reappraisal of Enlightenment history to a reflective summary of the current state of literary criticism.
This book will be of interest to anyone-in any discipline-who takes the past as a serious object of study.
It is because historical discourse is actualized in its culturally significant form as a specific kind of writing that we may consider the relevance of literary theory to both the theory and the practice of historiography.
The second volume of The Ethics of Narrative completes the project of bringing together nearly all of Hayden White's uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, including articles, essays, and previously unpublished lectures. As in the first volume, volume two features White's trenchant articulations of his influential theories, as well as his explorations of a wide range of ideas and authors at the frontiers of critical theory, literature, and historical studies. These include the concept of utopia in history, modernism and postmodernism, constructivism, the conceptualization of historical periods such as "the Sixties" and "the Enlightenment," the representation of the Holocaust in scholarly and literary writing, as well as essays on Frank Kermode, Saul Friedländer, and Krzysztof Pomian.
Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
"[White] has clearly made significant advances in laying a foundation for a better understanding of the intricate interaction between narrative representation and what it purports to represent in both history and literature."--American Historical Review.
Mit den vier Tropen der Metapher, der Metonymie, der Synekdoche und der Ironie erfasst er systematisch die ? poetische Logik? des historischen Diskurses und bezieht dessen Formen der Darstellung historischen Geschehens auf Grundformen der menschlichen Weltaneignung.
Przeszłość praktyczna to kolejny tom antologii tekstów uznanego za najwybitniejszego teoretyka historii w świecie anglojęzycznym, amerykańskiego badacza teorii i historii historiografii - Haydena White’a. Po wydanej przez Universitas w 2000 roku Poetyce pisarstwa historycznego (red. Ewa Domańska i Marek Wilczyński; wydanie II poprawione i uzupełnione 2010) oraz tomie Proza historyczna (red. Ewa Domańska, 2009), proponowany zbiór będzie zawierać zarówno nowe teksty White’a opublikowane w ciągu ostatnich sześciu lat, jak i artykuły starsze, które warto przywołać w związku z rosnącym w Polsce zainteresowaniem posthumanizmem, utopią, myśleniem systemowym, postkolonialnym podejściem do badań przeszłości Europy Wschodniej, oraz współczesną sztuką jako medium badania przeszłości.