The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

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JHU Press, Aug 1, 1990 - Literary Criticism - 264 pages

Hayden 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.

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Contents

1 The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality
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
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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

About the author (1990)

Hayden White is professor of the history of consciousness and Presidential Professor of Historical Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is the author of Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, both available from Johns Hopkins University Press.

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