Publications

Detailed Information

픽션으로서의 역사: 헤이든 화이트의 역사론 : History as Fiction: Hayden Whites View of History

Cited 0 time in Web of Science Cited 0 time in Scopus
Authors

안병직

Issue Date
2004
Publisher
서울대학교 인문대학 인문학연구원
Citation
인문논총, Vol.51, pp. 35-75
Keywords
서사메타역사수사법 이론언어로의 전환픽션역사적 상대주의
Abstract
Hayden White is the most prominent American scholar to unite
historiography and literary criticism into a broader reflection on narrative
and cultural understanding. Specifically, the publication in 1973 of Hayden
Whites Metahistory marked a decisive turn in philosophical thinking about
history. In this book, he offers an ambitious schema of the poetics of
history, describing four structures of emplotment, four argumentative
models, and four ideological strategies. He adds to this a fourth, deeper
category of analysis, also comprising four modes — the theory of tropes.
Hayden Whites tropology defines the deep structural forms of historical
thought as the four literary figures metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and
irony, each possessing its characteristic means of organizing parts into
wholes. White asserts that the vision of a given historian derives not from
the evidence, since the vision decides in advance what will constitute the
relevant evidence, but rather from conscious and unconscious choices made
among the possibilities offered by the categories of his historical poetics.
Thus, given a basic honesty and competence on the part of the historian
studied, White can find no reason to prefer one account over another on
historical grounds alone. The version of the past we choose depends rather
on moral and aesthetic values, which ground both the historian and the
audience and are beyond the call of historical evidence.
According to White, all historical interpretation is fundamentally rhetorical
because interpreting is what we do when we are uncertain how to describe
or explain something. This uncertainty leads the interpreter to search for the
available means of persuasion, which are figural in form and which can be
successfully invoked only by working through the range of tropes. Thus,
tropology forms a basic component in the study of historical narrative,
which fashions a unity from the diverse elements of language.
White maintains that the decision to narrativize real events as history
serves the ideological function of asserting the beautiful, meaningful
nature of the past (and present) and repressing any possible choice of
encoding a sublime, chaotic, terrifying meaninglessness as reality. This
de-sublimation made possible the professionalization of nineteenthcentury
history by cutting its traditional ties to rhetoric, which emphasizes
choices among possible forms of representation. Thus, history makes the
past into an object of desire by giving it the same kind of coherence found
in fictions.
Whites theory of historical narrative and tropes problematicises any kind
of realist empiricism and/or mimeticism, points to the inescapable presentcenteredness
and positional nature of all historical interpretations, queries
old distinctions between proper history and historicism by virtue of, for
example, their common metahistorical status. Indeed, White maintains that
historical study should show people how the past can be used to effect an
ethically responsible transition from the present to the future in ways which
prioritise the responsibilities of the individual by inducing in them an
awareness that any given present condition is always, in part, a product of
specifically human choices which can therefore be changed by further
human action.
ISSN
1598-3021
Language
Korean
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/10371/29472
Files in This Item:
Appears in Collections:

Altmetrics

Item View & Download Count

  • mendeley

Items in S-Space are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Share