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Hayden White

1928–2018

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

For White, historians do not find stories in the past but make them: the same events can be emplotted as romance, tragedy, comedy or satire, and the choice between such accounts rests finally on aesthetic or moral grounds, not on the evidence alone.

Placement

Science & Human Sciences Neighbouring field: History · North America · Language, Epistemology, Aesthetics

American historian and theorist of historical writing, last in Santa Cruz and Stanford: in “Metahistory” (1973) he argued that historical works are narrative prose discourses whose plots, arguments and politics rest on a prior poetic choice among four tropes – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony.

Key ideas

  • Emplotment
  • The four master tropes
  • The fictions of factual representation
  • The content of the form

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Influence

Influenced by 4

  • Giambattista Vico

    influenced by

    White took Vico’s four master tropes – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony – as the deep structure of historical consciousness (Metahistory, 1973; ‘The Tropics of History’, 1976). H. White, Metahistory (1973); “The Tropics of History: The Deep Structure of the New Science”, in G. Tagliacozzo and D. P. Verene (eds.), Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity (1976); G. Tagliacozzo and H. White (eds.), Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium (1969)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Giambattista Vico › 1668–1744

  • Benedetto Croce

    influenced by

    White, who came to Croce in Rome, wrote ‘The Abiding Relevance of Croce’s Idea of History’ (1963) and read him as a philosopher of history in Metahistory (1973). H. White, “The Abiding Relevance of Croce’s Idea of History”, Journal of Modern History 35 (1963); Metahistory (1973); H. Paul, Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (2011)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Benedetto Croce › 1866–1952

  • Karl Mannheim

    influenced by

    White adapted his four modes of ideological implication – anarchist, conservative, radical, liberal – from Mannheim’s Ideologie und Utopie (1929) for his theory of historical writing (Metahistory, 1973). H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973); K. Mannheim, Ideologie und Utopie (1929)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Karl Mannheim › 1893–1947

  • Reinhart Koselleck

    influenced by disputed

    White wrote the foreword to Koselleck’s The Practice of Conceptual History (2002), Koselleck that to White’s Auch Klio dichtet (1986); a direct influence on White is uncertain. H. White, foreword to R. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History (2002); R. Koselleck, foreword to H. White, Auch Klio dichtet oder Die Fiktion des Faktischen (1986)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Reinhart Koselleck › 1923–2006

Influenced 1

  • Paul Ricœur

    influenced

    In Time and Narrative I (1983) Ricœur drew on White’s Metahistory (1973) for emplotment in historiography, later objecting that its tropology loosens reference to the real past (2000). P. Ricœur, Temps et récit I (1983); La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (2000); H. White, Metahistory (1973)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Paul Ricœur › 1913–2005

Works

Position

White is on the map as the theorist who made the writing of history itself a subject of the philosophy of history. “Metahistory” (1973) analysed four historians – Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville and Burckhardt – and four philosophers of history – Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Croce – as authors of narrative prose. Drawing on Northrop Frye, Stephen Pepper and Karl Mannheim, he distinguished modes of emplotment, argument and ideological implication and traced them back to a poetic “prefiguration” of the historical field in one of four tropes, a scheme he took from rhetoric and from Vico. He concluded that the best grounds for preferring one account of history to another are aesthetic or moral rather than epistemological. The essays of “Tropics of Discourse” (1978) and “The Content of the Form” (1987) extended this to the “fictions of factual representation” and to the meaning that narrative form itself carries. Ricœur discussed his theory of emplotment in “Time and Narrative” and later objected that it neglects the reference to a real past; Koselleck wrote the foreword to the German edition of “Tropics of Discourse” (1986). White’s work became, in G. G. Iggers’s account, a key reference of the “linguistic turn” in historiography and was criticised by historians who saw in it a relativism about historical truth, above all in the debate on representing the Holocaust; this is set out under “Context & critique”.

Life & context

Hayden V. White was born on 12 July 1928 in Martin, Tennessee, and grew up between Tennessee and Detroit, where his father sought work in the car industry. After serving in the Navy at the end of the Second World War he studied history at Wayne State University in Detroit on the GI Bill (BA 1951), where William J. Bossenbrook was his teacher, and medieval history at the University of Michigan (MA 1952, PhD 1956). Two years in Rome on a Fulbright fellowship, researching medieval church reform in the Vatican Library, brought him into contact with Carlo Antoni and the work of Benedetto Croce. He taught at Wayne State, the University of Rochester and UCLA, directed the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University (1973–76) and from 1978 taught in the History of Consciousness programme at the University of California, Santa Cruz; he was later also professor of comparative literature at Stanford. He died in Santa Cruz on 5 March 2018.

Further main works

  • Tropics of Discourse (1978)
  • Figural Realism (1999)
  • The Practical Past (2014)

Sources: Wikipedia · Wikidata

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