Work · Science & Human Sciences
The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
Essays of the 1980s: narrative is not a neutral container for historical facts but carries a meaning of its own – the wish for coherence, closure and moral sense; with chapters on Droysen, Jameson, Ricœur’s “Time and Narrative” and Foucault.
Introduction
“The Content of the Form” (1987) gathers essays that White wrote in the 1980s on the place of narrative in historical writing. The opening essay, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” (1980), compares annals, chronicles and narrative histories and argues that narrative gives events a coherence, closure and moral meaning that reality itself does not display. Further chapters examine the debate on narrative in French and Anglo-American historical theory, the politics of the discipline of history, Droysen’s “Historik”, Fredric Jameson’s Marxist theory of narrative, Ricœur’s “Time and Narrative” and Foucault’s discourse. The book shows White moving from a typology of tropes to the question of what narrative form itself means.
Connections
Responds to
- Time and Narrative1983 · Paul Ricœur
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