Narrative Flashcards
What is narrative?
The basic historical mode of representing events in the form of a chronological story. Composed of events unfolding in time, the narrative mode is distinguished in traditional historiographical thought from the dissertative mode
Who was Hayden White?
White, in the 1960s, began studying how historians have dealt with this problem of representing reality. In a post-modernist vein.
What was Hayden White’s work influenced by?
Erich Auerbach - a historicist (most things can be drawn from the context of a text). Auerbach addressed the key differences between realistic and truthful narratives. The former are detailed enough to form their own conceptual reality (Homer’s Odyssey), but are ultimately rhetorical (heroes and types). The latter are representative of human experience, but not necessarily real in detail: we might think of those as ‘true’
What do people consider White’s work to be in the school of?
Hayden White is not quite a deconstructionist, but is influenced by formalism. It makes a distinction between reality and verbal representation of reality. He reads history like it were literature.
What does White do in his most famous work ‘Metahistory’?
He argues that professional historians were given a privileged language, a way of constructing narratives of history that could attain the status of ‘true’. it is the application of questions to these narratives that ascribe meaning to them
How does White distinguish between primary and secondary referents?
Primary- level of events/chronological narrative
Secondary- emplotment of events into a meaningful plot structure
Which four archetypal structures does White believe that narratives fit into?
Romantic
Tragic
Comic
Ironic
What did Lemon recognise about the nature of narrative?
Argues that choices of selection are rested upon the requirements for coherence and intelligibility
