The reception of hayden white

History and Theory

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 143-161

  Vann, Richard T ^a  

^a WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049237998     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00045     Document Type: Review

References (60)

1. Historical Understanding, ed. Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T. Vann (Ithaca, 1987), 22
2. In History and Theory 5 (1966), 111-134
3. Most notably in "Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth," in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 37-53, in part a response to Carlo Ginzburg, "Just One Witness," in ibid., especially 88-94
4. See also Ginzburg, "Ekphrasis and Quotation," Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 50 (1988), 4.
5. Hans Kellner was especially perceptive to detect this in Metahistory; see his "A Bedrock of Order: Hayden White's Linguistic Humanism," History and Theory, Beiheft 19 (1980), 1-29
6. White's two essays on Foucault, "Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground," History and Theory 12 (1973), 23-54
7. (reprinted in Tropics) and "Foucault's Discourse: The Historiography of Anti-Humanism," in Structuralism and Since: From Levi Strauss to Derrida, ed. John Sturrock (Oxford, 1979), 81-115
8. (expanded and reprinted in Content) have been frequently cited. Allan Megill credits him with the major role in introducing Foucault to American historians, with a review of Surveiller et punir in the American Historical Review in 1977 ("The Reception of Foucault by Historians," Journal of the History of Ideas 48 [1987], 127)
9. New Literary History 7 (1975), 97-111
10. Other essays which failed to make the cut are "The Structure of Historical Narrative," Clio 1 (1972), 5-20
11. "The Tasks of Intellectual History," The Monist 58 (1969), 606-630
12. "The Politics of Contemporary Philosophy of History," Clio 3 (1973), 35-53 (with critique by W. H. Dray, ibid., 53-76)
13. "The Problem of Style in Realistic Representation: Marx and Flaubert," in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (Philadelphia, 1979), 213-229
14. (with Frank Manuel), "Rhetoric and History," in Theories of History: Papers of the Clark Library Seminar, ed. Peter Reill (Los Angeles, 1978), 1-25
15. And "Historical Pluralism," Critical Inquiry 12 (1986), 480-493
16. Among these later essays are "The Rhetoric of Interpretation, " Poetics Today 9 (1988), 253-279
17. "New Historicism: A Comment," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York, 1989), 293-302
18. "'Figuring the Nature of the Times Deceased': Literary Theory and Historical Writing," in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (New York, 1989), 19-43
19. "The Metaphysics of Narrativity: Time and Symbol in Ricoeur's Philosophy of History," in On Paul Ricoeur, ed. David C. Wood (London, 1991)
20. Some of these are considered in Wolf Kansteiner, "Hayden White's Critique of the Writing of History," History and Theory 32 (1993), 273-295.
21. "The Challenge of Quantitative History," Historical Methods 17 (1984), 86-94. But then the proposition with which so few would concur is "There is no difference between history and fiction." Monkkonen goes on to note that "in the philosophical literature, only a handful have actually put forth a counter-argument." The view he attributes to White could much more appropriately be located in Barthes; but, bizarrely, Monkkonen does not believe that Barthes questions "the epistemological belief of the historian."
22. Kellner, "White's Linguistic Humanism," 13.
23. Phyllis Grosskurth, review of Metahistory in Canadian Historical Review 56 (1975), 193
24. Andrew Ezergailis, review of Metahistory in Clio 5 (Winter 1976), 240. Grosskurth was not totally hostile, although she believed that White wished to impose "exigent artistic laws" on historical writing, while Ezergailis, who called the work a tour de force, was on the whole favorable
25. "History and the Study of Culture," New Literary History 21 (Winter, 1990), 417
26. (reprinted in History and ⋯: Histories within the Human Sciences, ed. Ralph Cohen and Michael S. Roth [Charlottesville, Va., 1995J, 382-395)
27. Journal of Modern History 52 (1980), 124
28. Megill, "Reception of Foucault, " 127.
29. "Romancing the Stone: History-Writing and Rhetoric," Social History 18 (1993), 235-249.
30. Review of Metahistory in Pacific Historical Review 43 (1974), 598-600
31. Review of Metahistory in History 60 (1975), 83
32. Review of Metahistory in Journal of Modern History 47 (1975), 642-43. Sometimes yesterday's monstrosity quickly becomes acceptable, like White's coinage "emplotment."
33. "Philosophy and Theory of History," in International Handbook of Historical Studies, ed. Georg Iggers and Harold T. Parker (Westbrook, Conn., 1979), 25
34. Kenneth Burke, one of the two authors most influential in White's thinking about tropes, acknowledges this difficulty (A Grammar of Motives [1945] [Berkeley, 1969], 503)
35. David Carroll, "On Tropology: The Forms of History" [a review of Metahistory], Diacritics 6 (Fall 1976), 58-64
36. The best discussion of these issues is Hans Kellner, "The Inflatable Trope as Narrative Theory: Structures or Allegory," Diacritics (Spring 1981), 14-28.
37. See John S. Nelson, "Tropal History and the Social Sciences: Reflections on [Nancy] Struever's Remarks," History and Theory, Beiheft 19 (1980), 80-101. Struever's essay was "Topics in History," ibid., 66-79
38. Metahistory, 372
39. "A Metatheoretical Analysis: Hayden White and Four Narratives of 'Russian' History," Clio 19 (1990), 215-235. Ostrowski thinks it a "lapse" in the response to White's book that nobody had tried such an empirical test before
40. "Figural Relativism, or the Poetics of Historiography [review of Metahistory]," Diacritics 6 (1976), 2-9
41. "Typologies and Cycles in Intellectual History," History and Theory, Beiheft 19 (1980), 30-38
42. Review of Metahistory in Clio, 245
43. Review of Tropics, MLN 93 (1978), 1037-1043, especially 1042
44. He refers to Metahistory, 274
45. "The Discourse of Subversion," Humanities in Society 2 (1979), 34
46. Idem
47. Historical Understanding, 23
48. "Toward Varennes," New Literary History 18 (1986), 77-98, especially 87
49. An exception is the remarkable article by J. L. Gorman, "Objectivity and Truth in History," Inquiry 17 (1974), 373-397
50. L. B. Cebik in "Fiction and History: A Common Core?" International Studies in Philosophy 24 (1992), 47-63 treats this as White's true position, disregarding all his qualifications and disclaimers. The article is a tirade against White
51. "Social Change and Literary Language: The Textualization of the Past in Thirteenth-Century Old French Historiography," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 (1987), 139 n.2
52. Tropics, 106
53. "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," in Content, 20
54. "The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory," in The Content of the Form, 44. Several of the questions I have asked are pointed out by Ann Rigney in her excellent "Narrativity and Historical Representation," Poetics Today 12 (1991), 591-605
55. Quoted in ibid., 68-69
56. Besides Ginzburg (fn. 4) see Aviezer Tucker, A Theory of Historiography as a Pre-Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 24 (1993), 656, fn. 48
57. Gregory F. Goekjian, "Genocide and Historical Desire," Semiotica 83 (1991), 212-215
58. Content, 80
59. "Emplotment and Truth," 40
60. "Towards a Critical Historiography: Recent Work in Philosophy of History," Philosophy 56 (1981), 370