Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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8
Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt & Margaret Jacob, op. cit., p. 219.
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13
every history is first and foremost a verbal artifact, a product of a special kind of
language use. Hayden White, Figural Realism. Studies in the Mimesis Effect. Baltimore, John
Hopkins University Press, 1999, p. 4.
14
representation (argument from similirarity) subsumes explanation (argument from
contiguity), which becomes a “moment” of representation, an attribute. Hans Kellner, “A
Bedrock of Order: Hayden White’s Linguistic Humanism”, History and Theory. Studies in the
Philosophy of History. Beiheft 19. Metahistory: Six Critiques. [Middletown, Conn.], Wesleyan
University Press, 1980, p. 7.
15
I have noted the subsumption of Explanation by Narration; a similar operation takes place
with Tenor/Vehicle, Non Fiction/Fiction, Science/Art, and History Proper/Philosophy of History. In
each case, the first term of the paradigm becomes o “moment” of the second. Ibíd., p. 10.
16
it is absurd to suppose that, because a historical discourse is cast in the mode of a
narrative, it must be mythical, fictional, substantially imaginary, or otherwise ‘unrealistic’ in what
it tells us about the world. Hayden White, op. cit., p. 22.
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20
the term ‘event’, like ‘text’ or ‘self’ or ‘historical’ retains the essentialism that
postmodernism challenges. In a postmodern process, every event may be a text, but no text is
single. It is the nature of the process, the series, the sequence that most interests me. Jury Lotman,
La estructura del texto artístico, Madrid, Itsmo, 1992, p. 3.
21
My thesis is that the principal source of a historical work’s strength as an interpretation
of the events which it treats as the data to be explained is rhetorical in nature. So too the rhetoric
of a historical work is, in my view, the principal source of its appeal to those of its readers who
accept it as a ‘realistic’ or ‘objective’ account of ‘what really happened’ in the past. Hayden
White, Theories of History, papers read at clark library seminar, march 6, 1976, Los Ángeles,
Clark Memory Library, 1978,, p. 3.
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27
White tropical analysis is peculiarly antihistorical, since it focuses on texts, on products,
not the events of process […] White’s poetics of history is doubly disfunctional then, because his
focus on the text, not the discipline, stipulates the object of his history as ahistorical, and because
he must mantein the self referentiality, the “literariness” of the text. Nancy Struever, op. cit., p. 67.
28
What I question, what I refuse, what I mark out as my own differentiation from the
linguistic turn, is all that is lost in the tendency to reify language, objectifying it as unmediated
discourse, placing it beyond social, economic, and political relations, and in the process
displacing essential structures and formations to the historical sidelines. At stake is nothing less
than many of the gains that historical materialism, as theory, and social history, as practice,
however constrained and contradictory, were thought to have registered over the course of the
last decades. For in the current fixation on language a materialist understanding of the past is all
too often sacrificed on the altar of an idealized reading of discourse and its influence. Bryan D.
Palmer, Descent into Discourse. The reification of language and the writing of social history,
Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1990, p. 5.
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29
Jürgen Habermas, op. cit., pp. 231-232.
30
Hayden White, Tropics of Discouse, Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore, John
Hopkins University Press, 1985, pp. 230-282.
31
For the things Derrida discusses are inside White. Dominick LaCapra, “A poetics of
Historiography: Hayden White’s Tropics of Discourse”, Rethinking intellectual history, texts,
contexts, language, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1983, p. 79.
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41
White’s tropological categories, in short, displace onto the text the kind of categorial
thinking that most historians apply to the context. Kramer, Lloyd S. “Literature, Criticism, and
Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra”; en Aletta
Biersack [et al.] The new cultural history, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989, p. 112.
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42
The mistake in White’s conception of knowledge for the unreconstructed positivist
derives from his assumption that literary and artistic knowledge are as valuable as scientific
knowledge in comprehending the world, but White makes no concession to scientists on this point.
Lloyd S. Kramer, “Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of
Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra”; en Aletta Biersack [et al.], The new cultural history,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989, p. 123.
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43
The weaker the conviction among historians that their intellectual activity is, or at least
should be, rationally informed, the more easily historiography is made over into an instrument of
ideology. The much celebrated revival of narrative in historiography erodes that conviction, as
does the much discussed metahistorical thesis of the essentially rhetorical character of
historiography. Lionel Gossman, Between History and Literature, Cambridge, Harvard
University Press, 1990, p. 290.