Hayden white's appeal to the historians

History and Theory

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 182-193

  Ankersmit, F R ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN   (Netherlands)

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EID: 61049237975     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00048     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. "Often a certain conflict has been observed between an immature philosophy and history. By way of a priori thinking, conclusions were drawn about what must be. Without being aware that such ideas are exposed to many doubts, men went about trying to find these ideas again in the history of the world. Out of the infinite number of facts those were chosen which seemed to confirm these ideas. This kind of writing has also been called philosophy of history." See L. von Ranke, The Theory and Practice of History, edited with an introduction by Georg G. Iggers and Konrad von Moltke (Indianapolis, 1973), 29
2. Having Ranke in mind, Hegel condemns his writings as "die bunte Menge von Detail, kleinlichen Interessen, Handlungen der Soldaten, Privatsachen, die auf die politische Interessen keinen Einfluss haben,-unfähig, ein ganzes, einen allgemeinen Zweck zu erkennen" ["focusing on the varied chaos of details, puny interests, actions by soldiers, private affairs which have no bearing at all on what is of interest from a political point of view-and is therefore a kind of history writing that is incapable of discerning some general purpose in history"]. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Band I: Die Vernunft in der Geschichte (Hamburg, 1955), 15
3. E. H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford, 1956)
4. For this "discussion," see A. Marwick, "Two Approaches to Historical Study: The Metaphysical (including 'Postmodernism') and the Historical" Journal of Contemporary History 30 (1995), 1-35
5. H. White, response to Arthur Marwick, Journal of Contemporary History 30 (1995), 233-245. Further participants in the debate were Wulf Kansteiner, Geoffrey Roberts, Beverley Southgate, and Christopher Lloyd. The last probably further added to the confusion by linking White's case to that of his own sociologically oriented approach to historical writing. For these contributions, see the 1996 issue of the journal mentioned, 191-228
6. Marwick, "Two Approaches," 12
7. H. V. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973); for a succinct summary of the major theses defended in Metahistory
8. see White, "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact," in White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, 1978), 81-101.
9. E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, 1968)
10. For White's present view of Auerbach see H. V. White, "Auerbach's Literary History: Figural Causation and Modern Historicism," in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. S. Lerer (Stanford, 1996)
11. For an exposition of the link between Auerbach's notion of the mixture of the styles and the sublimity of the real, see F. R. Ankersmit, "Why Realism? Auerbach on the Representation of Reality," Poetics Today (forthcoming)
12. H. V. White, "The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-sublimation," Critical Inquiry 9 (1982)
13. Also reprinted in White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), 58-83.
14. White, Content; 69.
15. H. V. White, "Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth," in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, ed
16. S. Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass., 1991)
17. White, "Writing in the Middle-Voice," Stanford Literary Review 9 (1992).
18. H. V. White, "The Modernist Event," in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, ed. V. Sobchack (New York, 1996), 17-38
19. S. Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (New York, 1992)
20. S. Schama, Landscape and Memory (London, 1995)
21. This is, needless to say, one of the main insights developed in R̈sen's trilogy. See, for example, J. R̈sen, Historische Vernunft (Göttingen, 1983), 57, where Rüsen writes "das historische Erzählen ist ein Medium der menschlichen Identitätsbildung" ["human individuals conceive of their identity in terms of the historical narratives that they tell themselves about their past"]