The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical RepresentationHayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning—its production, distribution, and consumption—in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in "the content of the form," in the way our narrative capacities transform the present into a fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have descended. |
Contents
1 | |
2 The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory | 26 |
Discipline and DeSublimation | 58 |
Historical Writing as a Bourgeois Science | 83 |
The Historiography of AntiHumanism | 104 |
Jamesons Redemption of Narrative | 142 |
Time and Symbol in Ricoeurs Philosophy of History | 169 |
Method and Ideology in Intellectual History | 185 |
Notes | 215 |
Index | 237 |
Other editions - View all
The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation Hayden White Limited preview - 1990 |
The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation Hayden White Limited preview - 1990 |
Common terms and phrases
allegory anagogical analysis annalist aspect authority Barthes bourgeois catachresis chronicle claim conceived conception consciousness CONTEMPORARY HISTORICAL THEORY CONTENT critical culture discipline distinction Droysen emplotment endow ethical fact fiction Foucault function G. W. F. Hegel given Hayden White Hegel hermeneutics historians historical discourse historical events historical narrative historical studies HISTORICAL WRITING HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ANTI-HUMANISM human sciences ideology imaginary insofar intellectual interpretation J. H. Hexter Jameson kind knowledge language literary literature logical Marx Marxist meaning mode modern moral narration narrative history NARRATIVE IN CONTEMPORARY narrativist narrativization nature Nietzsche nineteenth century notion past Paul Ricoeur philosophy of history plot possible Post-Structuralism problem production question real events realism referent reflection represented rhetorical Ricoeur Roland Barthes Roman Jakobson Romanticism Saint Gall semiological sense sexuality simply social society speaking story structure style sublime symbolic temporality theoretical things thought tion tive torical trans truth
Popular passages
Page 228 - It looks to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than Europe. All circumstances taken together, the French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world.
Page 10 - And this consideration permits us to ask what kind of notion of reality authorizes construction of a narrative account of reality in which continuity rather than discontinuity governs the articulation of the discourse.
Page 219 - ... feelings of men is still very far from being terminated, yet its results already admit of no comparison with anything that the world has ever before witnessed. I go back from age to age up to the remotest antiquity, but I find no parallel to what is occurring before my eyes : as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.
Page 114 - episteme" we mean . . . the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems.
Page 207 - As it happened, he never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the players; but this is the only interest in the story, which otherwise has no moral and little incident.
Page 6 - ... only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity.
Page 1 - We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As Barthes says, narrative is translatable without fundamental damage," in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is not.
Page 11 - But the presence of these blank years in the annalist's account permits us to perceive, by way of contrast, the extent to which narrative strains for the effect of having filled in all the gaps, of having put an image of continuity, coherency, and meaning in place of the fantasies of emptiness, need, and frustrated desire that inhabit our nightmares about the destructive power of time.
Page 75 - One must face the fact that when it comes to apprehending the historical record, there are no grounds to be found in the historical record itself for preferring one way of construing its meaning over another