Metahistory

Introduction

A famous American historian Hayden White is known for his literary works of the nineteenth and twentieth century historians and philosophers. In his works, Hayden argues that historical research is not understand as accurate and objective picture of the past, but as a creative texts are structured by the narrative and rhetorical devices that form of historical interpretation. The first major paper of Hayden white, Metahistory (52-56), are a detailed plan to explore different narrative and rhetorical strategies in the nineteenth century, European historians such as Leopold von Ranke and Jacob Burckhardt. Under the influence of eighteenth-century scholar Giambattista Vico and the literary critic Kenneth Burke, Hayden White offers the theory of tropes, or symbolic mode, which is the deep structure of historical thought. Hayden White has developed and modified his arguments from the Metahistory in the two collections of essays, Tropics of discourse (45-49) and the content of forms (19-97). Although his work has been criticized by historians and literary critics, Hayden White is widely respected for raising vital questions about the hidden assumptions that inform all kinds of historical interpretation.

Discussion

Metahistory is Hayden Hayden White's latest attempt to develop a critique and alternative to the understandings of history and the writing of history which have come to dominate Western thought since the Enlightenment. More specifically, the book focuses, as its subtitle indicates, on "the historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe." Hayden White's is an excellent effort, posing important questions and provocative interpretations of major nineteenth-century historians and philosophers of history. Moreover, on the basis of an analysis of the components and role of linguistic or poetic "style" in historical writing, Hayden White proffers his own philosophy of history. This includes three projects: (1) a philosophy of historical explanation; (2) a history of the degeneration of nineteenth-century historiography and philosophy of history into "ironism" - a condition of relativism, skepticism, and self-doubt; and (3) a proposal for transcending such ironism, thus revitalizing the contemporary apprehension and compehension of history. Clearly this is an adventurous book. Its originality and scope of significant concern are themselves enough to warrant its detailed examination.

In this review, I shall call attention to some of the remarkable strengths of Hayden Hayden White's argument; but I also shall identify and attempt improvements upon some of its important deficiencies. Thereby I shall modify somewhat the first two projects of Hayden White's philosophy of history in the interest of showing the inadequacy of its third project, Hayden Hayden White's proposal for transcending our nineteenth-century legacy of ironism. The theme of Metahistory was prefigured in Hayden White's previous essay on "The Burden of History." There White concentrated upon the contemporary predicament of the historian, arguing that "the burden of the historian in our time is to re-establish the dignity of historical studies on a basis that will make them consonant with the aims and purposes of the intellectual community at large, that is, transform historical studies in such a way as to allow the historian to participate positively in the ...