Hayden White, ein Historiker in der Tradition der Literaturkritik, ist bekannt für seine bahnbrechende Arbeit über historische Vorstellungskraft. Er analysierte akribisch die Narrative von Historikern und Philosophen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts und schlug vor, dass historischer Diskurs eine Form von Fiktion sei, die nach ihrer Struktur und sprachlichen Verwendung klassifiziert werden könne. White stellte die Vorstellung objektiver historischer Darstellungen in Frage und argumentierte, dass Historiker unausgesprochene Annahmen bei der Auswahl und Interpretation von Ereignissen verwenden. Seine Arbeit veränderte die Geschichtstheorie grundlegend, indem sie rhetorische Tropen auf erzählende Diskurse anwandte und tiefere Einblicke in die Haltungen der Autoren und historischen Kontexte offenbarte.
Mit den vier Tropen der Metapher, der Metonymie, der Synekdoche und der Ironie erfasst er systematisch die ? poetische Logik? des historischen Diskurses und bezieht dessen Formen der Darstellung historischen Geschehens auf Grundformen der menschlichen Weltaneignung.
Die historische Einbildungskraft im 19. Jahrhundert in Europa
Ausgehend von seiner Untersuchung der großen Historiographen des 19. Jahrhunderts entwirft Hayden White eine formale Theorie der Arbeit des Historikers, die den unvermeidlich poetischen Charakter der Geschichtsschreibung herausarbeitet. Die Debatte, die mit diesem großen Buch angestoßen wurde, wirkt bis heute nach.
The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
In White's view, beyond the surface level of the historical text, there is a deep structural, or latent, content that is generally poetic and specifically linguistic in nature. This deeper content - the metahistorical element - indicates what an appropriate historical explanation should be.
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.
The Fiction of Narrative traces the arc and evolution of White's field- defining thought and will become standard reading for students and scholars of historiography, the theory of history, and literary studies.
Tropics of Discourse develops White's ideas on interpretation in history, on the relationship between history and the novel, and on history and historicism. Vico, Croce, Derrida, and Foucault are among the figures he assesses in this work, which also offers original interpretations of a number of literary themes, including the Wild Man and the Noble Savage. White's commentary ranges from a reappraisal of Enlightenment history to a reflective summary of the current state of literary criticism.
It is because historical discourse is actualized in its culturally significant form as a specific kind of writing that we may consider the relevance of literary theory to both the theory and the practice of historiography.
The second volume of The Ethics of Narrative completes the project of bringing together nearly all of Hayden White's uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, including articles, essays, and previously unpublished lectures. As in the first volume, volume two features White's trenchant articulations of his influential theories, as well as his explorations of a wide range of ideas and authors at the frontiers of critical theory, literature, and historical studies. These include the concept of utopia in history, modernism and postmodernism, constructivism, the conceptualization of historical periods such as "the Sixties" and "the Enlightenment," the representation of the Holocaust in scholarly and literary writing, as well as essays on Frank Kermode, Saul Friedländer, and Krzysztof Pomian.
"[White] has clearly made significant advances in laying a foundation for a better understanding of the intricate interaction between narrative representation and what it purports to represent in both history and literature."--American Historical Review.
