hayden white the content of the form pdf

The writing of history could not have a specific status when it was, depending on the case, subjected to the tropes and figures of rhetorical discourse, regarded as a place where the meaning of the events themselves is displayed, or perceived as a major obstacle to true knowledge. Whether a collection of examples as in antiquity, presented as knowledge of itself in the German historicist and Romantic tradition, or proclaimed “scientific” in the twentieth century, history had no choice but to refuse to think of itself as a narrative and writing.

Their questioning created a profound sense of anxiety among historians, for history had long ignored its membership in the class of narratives and erased the features specific to its writing in its claim to scientific objectivity. Veyne asserts that history “remains fundamentally an account, and what is called explanation is nothing but the way in which the account is arranged in a comprehensible plot.” Hayden White, by identifying “the deep structural forms of the historical imagination” with the four figures of classical rhetoric (i.e., metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony), and de Certeau, in stating that “historical discourse claims to provide a true content (which pertains to verifiability) but in the form of a narration,” forced historians to abandon altogether the certainty of immediate and transparent coincidence between the past as it was and the historical explanation that gives it meaning. The first interrogation came directly from the identification of the rhetorical and narrative dimensions of history as indicated in three foundational works published between 19: Comment on écrit l’histoire by Paul Veyne (1971), Metahistory by Hayden White (1973), and L’écriture de l’histoire by Michel de Certeau (1975). To better judge the novelty of the issues raised today, it is perhaps worth recalling the two main interrogations formulated at the time. In presenting the challenges facing History today, I would like to pursue a reflection I began in a book published in 1998, Au bord de la falaise, devoted to the question that obsessed historians in the 1980s and 1990s: that of the supposed “crisis of history.” History between narrative and knowledge

Hayden white the content of the form pdf