Hayden White's perhaps richest and most profoundly argued book, The Content of the Form, touches many nerves in the American historical profession. The entirety of the book, from its premises through its most thoughtful exegeses of historical writing, insists that linguistic form is the primary carrier of content in historical writing, indeed, in historical knowledge. This insistence on a respectful and careful attention to the formal usages of nonfiction prose, truth-claiming language, goes well against the grain of American tastes. As (...) de Tocqueville presciently and correctly predicted, when Americans take to literature in a serious way, they won't have much patience with precise matters of form. Hayden White's narrative theory has had uphill work to penetrate this pervasive indifference, especially among historians.He has been joined in recent decades by Paul Ricoeur, whose Time and Narrative, beginning from different premises and a slightly different question, arrives at a sympathetic and complementary analysis of historical narrative. In spite of White's published hesitations about the political/philosophical tendencies of Ricoeur's work, I am convinced that their books are mutually supporting and, in an important cultural sense, belong together.Altogether, however, I do feel that the main import and justification of this present essay must rest on my quite serious reading of Hayden White's best joke, a profound shaggy dog story about the historian monk of St. Gall. (shrink)

One could only suppose that the apparently forgotten beginning of any story was unforgettable; perpetually one was subject to the sense of there having had to be a beginning somewhere. Like the lost first sheet of a letter or missing first pages of a book, the beginning kept on suggesting what must have been its nature. One never was out of reach of the power of what had been written first. Call it what you liked, call it a miscarried love, (...) it imparted, or was always ready and liable to impart, the nature of an alternative, attempted recovery or enforced second start to whatever followed. The beginning, in which was conceived the end, could not but continue to shape the middle part of the story, so that none of the realisations along that course were what had been expected, quite whole, quite final. (shrink)

The editors introduce the core areas of current debate within historical theory, bringing the reader as up to date with continuing debates and current developments as is possible. This important handbook brings together in one volume discussions of the role of modernity, empiricism, realism, post-modernity and deconstruction in the historian’s craft. Chapters are written by leading writers from around the world and cover a wide spread of historical sub-disciplines, such as social history, intellectual history, narrative, gender, memory, psycho-analysis and cultural (...) studies, taking in, along the way, the work of thinkers such as Paul Ricouer, Michel Foucault and Hayden White. (shrink)

The special session at the January 1997 annual meeting of the American Historical Association honoring the achievement of Hayden White and examining the impact and influence of his work on the historical discipline was an enlightening experience, at least to this participant, in many more ways than had been planned or promised. The session itself, albeit fairly routine by the standard of such occasions, seemed to take on a metanarrative of its own as each of the speakers confidently spoke at (...) length, proceeding from deep premises which bore no relation to any of the others. My own initial anticipation that this event would produce limited variations on a coherent theme-the impact of the linguistic turn and of narrative theory in particular on the practice and self-definition of academic history-turned gradually to rather disconcerted bemusement, especially when my turn came to listen to myself.My previous engagement to report on the AHA session in a paper for the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University became an opportunity to confide some of my freshest reactions to the event in a fairly small and very select audience. Narrating the ephemeral metanarrative I perceived as spinning itself out over the blunter facts of the AHA occasion, turned out to be the inner topic of my Wesleyan paper , not excluding the mysterious impulses of the audience and the existential atmosphere of the never to be forgotten Princess Ballroom. (shrink)

Then we Bishops appeared and took our seats on the tribunal of the cathedral. Clotild was called before us. She showered abuse on her Abbess and made a number of accusations against her. She maintained that the Abbess kept a man in the nunnery, dressed in woman's clothing and looking like a woman, although in effect there was no doubt that he was a man. His job was to sleep with the Abbess whenever she wanted it. “Why! There's the fellow!” (...) cried Clotild, pointing with her finger. Thereupon a man stepped forward, dressed in woman's clothing as I have told you. Everyone stared at him. He said that he was impotent and that that was the reason why he dressed himself up in this way. He maintained that he had never set eyes on the Abbess, although, of course, he knew her by name. He had never spoken to her in his life, and, in any case, he lived more than forty miles out of Poitiers. Clotild failed to prove her Abbess guilty on this count. (shrink)