This new book offers a clear and accessible exposition of Hayden White’s thought. In an engaging and wide-ranging analysis, Herman Paul discusses White’s core ideas and traces the development of these ideas from the mid-1950s to the present. Starting with White’s medievalist research and youthful fascination for French existentialism, Paul shows how White became increasingly convinced that historical writing is a moral activity. He goes on to argue that the critical concepts that have secured White’s fame – trope, plot, discourse, figural realism – all stem from his desire to explicate the moral claims and perceptions underlying historical writing. White emerges as a passionate thinker, a restless rebel against scientism, and a defender of existentialist humanist values.
This innovative introduction will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities, and help develop a critical understanding of an increasingly important thinker.
قائمة المحتويات
Acknowledgments.
Introduction: How to Read Hayden White.
White’s Achievement.
White’s Reputation.
White’s Questions.
Reinterpreting White.
Structure of the Book.
1. Humanist Historicism: The Italian White.
The Papal Schism of 1130.
White’s Covering Law Model.
‘Ideology’ or ‘Value Orientation’.
The Disenchantment of the World.
From Historicism to Sociology.
A Croce Partisan.
Questions In/About History.
2. Liberation Historiography: The Politics of
History.
Why History?
Choosing a Past.
Strong Humanist Father Figures.
Social Conditions of Freedom.
In Defense of Metahistory.
A Philosophy of Liberation.
3. The Historical Imagination: Four Modes of Realism.
An Inverted Disciplinary History.
Escaping the Ironist’s Cage.
Imagination: Thinking and Dreaming.
A Manual of Tropology.
Structuralist Linguistics.
The Freedom of Imagination.
White’s Linguistic Turn.
4. The Power of Discourse: White’s Structuralist
Adventure.
Three Modes of Comprehension.
Figurative Language.
Fictions of Factual Representation.
Objectivism and Relativism.
The Prison-House of Language.
Getting Out of History.
5. Masks of Meaning: Facing the Sublime.
The Content of the Form.
Stories Are Not Lived But Told.
Sublime Historical Reality.
The Specter of Fascism.
Modernist Anti-Narrativism.
6. Figuring History: The Modernist White.
Modernist Events.
Intransitive Writing.
A Turning Point?
Figural Realism.
The Practical Past.
Epilogue.
Notes.
Bibliography.
Index.
عن المؤلف
Herman Paul is lecturer in historical theory at Leiden University.
المزيد من الكتب الإلكترونية من نفس المؤلف (المؤلفين) / محرر
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