Hayden White

Trusting the Tale: The Narrativist Turn in the Human Sciences*

noticed, there has recently been a virtual explosion of interest in narrative and in theorizing about narrative; and it has been detonated from a remarkable diversity of sites, both within and without the walls of academia. Along with progressively more sophisticated and wide-ranging studies of narrative texts-historiographic, literary, cinematic, psychoanalytic--we find a burgeoning development of disciplinary appropriations or mediations: narrative and psychology, narrative and economics, narrative and experimental science, narrative and law, narrative and education, narrative and philosophy, narrative and ethnography, and so on, as well as numerous, newly negotiated cross-disciplinary approaches. The large question I want to ask is why? Why narrative? And why narrative

Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality

In a well-known essay on history and fiction, Michel de Certeau maintained that ‘fiction is the repressed other of historical discourse.’ Why? Because historical discourse wages everything on the true, while fictional discourse is interested in the real—which it approaches by way of an effort to fill out the domain of the possible or imaginable. A simply true account of the world based on what the documentary record permits one to talk about what happened in it at particular times, and places can provide knowledge of only a very small portion of what ‘reality’ consists of. However, the rest of the real, after we have said what we can assert to be true about it, would not be everything and anything we could imagine about it. The real would consist of everything that can be truthfully said about its actuality plus everything that can be truthfully said about what it could possibly be. Something like this may have been what Aristotle had in mind when, instead of opposing history to poetry, he suggested their complementarity, joining both of them to philosophy in the human effort to represent, imagine and think the world in its totality, both actual and possible, both real and imagined, both known and only experienced. De Certeau goes on to assert that the return of the repressed other (fiction) in history creates the simulacrum (the novel) that the history refuses to be. However, in refusing the real (which can only be symbolized, never represented), history refuses the possible, and it is precisely this refusal that prohibited history from becoming a modern science. For it is a characteristic of modern science (as against its Aristotelian prototype) to be more interested in the real than in the true; that is why it can, like fiction, Rethinking History Vol. 9, No. 2/3, June/September 2005, pp. 147 – 157

Figural Realism in Witness Literature

The definitions of theory given by our editors in their call for contributions to this issue of parallax would hardly justify the kind of hostility to theory currently abroad in the cultural sciences. Nor even the kind of questions put to theory by our editors. For in their definition, theory is a viewing, a travelling to see, a spectating, a going to consult an oracle, a judging of one thing by another, a contemplation, a consideration, a – well, a looking at something.

The Rhetoric of Interpretation

Contemporary thought about the nature of interpretation, especially in the human and social sciences, tends to stress the ways it differs from simple description, on the one hand, and from explanation on the other. This is not to suggest that interpretation, description and explanation are in any way mutually exclusive operations; indeed, we could well characterize description and explanation as different kinds of interpretation or, conversely, regard interpretation itself as a kind of explanation which features description over formal argument or demonstration as its modus operandi. But if we do wish to stress the differences between interpretation on the one side and both description and explanation on the other, we would have to insist on the propaedeutic and heuristic aspects, the pre-classificatory and preexplanatory functions of interpretation. We might wish to say that interpretation is what we do when we are uncertain how properly to describe some object or situation in which we have an interest and unsure about which of several available analytical methods should be used to explain it. As thus envisaged, interpretation is a product of thought in the preliminary stage of grasping an object by consciousness, thought in the effort of deciding, not only how to describe and explain such an object, but whether it can be adequately described or explained at all. Because interpretation typically entertains different ways of describing and explaining some object or situation deemed worthy of the

The Origin of Formalism in Social Science

By reading, you can know the knowledge and things more, not only about what you get from people to people. Book will be more trusted. As this the origin of formalism in social science, it will really give you the good idea to be successful. It is not only for you to be success in certain life you can be successful in everything. The success can be started by knowing the basic knowledge and do actions.

What is a Historical System

The title of this paper is misleading. For it suggests that I have an answer to a problem which has been debated, with inconclusive issue, by historians, philosophers, and social theorists for over one hundred and fifty years. It is also misleading because I propose primarily to tell what biological systems are not rather than what historical systems consist of. And this might seem presumptuous, given the presence in this audience of so many better qualified to speak on this subject than I am. But it seemed better to err on the side of presumption in the interest of encouraging debate than to stifle discussion by re-rehearsing the trivia of my own discipline’s internecine squabbles. In order to do our work, we historians frequently have to act as if we knew what a biological system was, the point at which the biological level of integration shades off into the historical level, and the ways that the two levels are related to one another. It would have been cowardly not to have admitted this at this gathering and to have avoided the issue altogether. And so, in the interest of possible clarification and at the risk of possible self-annihilation, I have decided to set forth what I believe to be some crucial distinctions between biological and historical systems, at least as they appear from the vantage point of the historian. If it turns out that these distinctions are not justified from the standpoint of biologists and philosophers of science, so much the better. We only discover the error of our ways by testing them in the presence of those best qualified to judge them.

Commentary: "With no particular place to go": Literary History in the Age of the Global Picture

[C]riminal organizations, cannily mirroring the practices of their legitimate counterparts, have ex ploited economies of scale, developed worldwide partnerships, and cultivated new markets. As a result, bank fraud, human trafficking, protection rackets, narcotics smuggling, state-sanctioned embezzlement, assassinations, and even old fashioned political corruption are practiced today on a scale previously unimaginable. ?Review of McMafia by Misha Glenny, New Yorker, June 23, 2008, 83

Response: The Dark Side of Art History

A response to Michael Ann Hollys paper “The Melancholic Art,” which is published in this issue. By referring to art historical writing as “melancholic,” Holly alludes to a psychoanalytic way of explaining the relation between the past and the present, how the past “returns” to, bears on, and colors the present in masked or distorted forms. The notion that the particular scholarly discipline of art history may be inflicted with a psychological malady or syndrome is intriguing, but Holly moots the possibility of history being a science by designating art history as an art. The foremost problem with associating art history with the psychoanalytic concept of loss is that it invariably views loss in terms of the individual subject and, thereby, makes no distinction between actual loss (of an organ or limb, for example) and virtual loss, or the sense of having lost an object that was never actually possessed.

Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Julia Kristeva , Leon S. Roudiez , Thomas Gora , Alice Jardine

DESIRE IN LANGUAGE A SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO LITERATURE AND ART JULIA KRISTEVA PDF Are you looking for Ebook desire in language a semiotic approach to literature and art julia kristeva PDF ? You will be glad to know that right now desire in language a semiotic approach to literature and art julia kristeva PDF is available on our online library. With our online resources, you can find desire in language a semiotic approach to literature and art julia kristeva or just about any type of ebooks, for any type of product.

Idealism, Politics and History. Sources of Hegelian Thought. (Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics.)

Preface Part I: Introduction Part II. J.-J. Rousseau: The Land of Chimeras and the Land Prejudices: 1. History, anti-history and the moral ego 2. Images of integration Part III. Immanuel Kant: The Rationalization of the Chimera: 1. Introduction: the German political consciousness 2. Morality, knowledge and historical vision 3. Humanity, time and freedom 4. The ambivalence of progress 5. Problems of politics 6. The teleology of practical reason Part IV. J.G. Fichte: The Chimera Dogmatized: 1. Fichte: introduction and tendencies 2. Metaphysics and consciousness 3. Legality and morality 4. History as logic: the logic of history 5. Cosmic nationalism 6. Education and the future community Part V. G.W.F. Hegel: The Chimera Preserved: 1. Hegel denies the potency of the future 2. A political context Part VI: Epilogue: The Future Unredeemed Bibliography Index.