The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical RepresentationHayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning—its production, distribution, and consumption—in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. 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. |
Contents
1 The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality | 1 |
2 The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory | 26 |
Discipline and DeSublimation | 58 |
Historical Writing as a Bourgeois Science | 83 |
The Historiography of AntiHumanism | 104 |
Jamesons Redemption of Narrative | 142 |
Other editions - View all
The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation Hayden White Limited preview - 1990 |
The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation Hayden White Limited preview - 1990 |
Common terms and phrases
actions activity analysis appear aspect authority basis called century chronicle claim conceived conception condition consciousness considered consists CONTENT course critical culture desire discipline discourse distinction effect especially existence experience explanation fact fiction figurative Foucault function given happened historians historical historical narrative historiography human identified ideology imagination interest interpretation Jameson kind knowledge language less literary literature lived logical Marxist matter meaning merely method mode moral narration narrative nature notion object origin past permits philosophy plot political possible practice present problem production proper question reality referent reflection regarded relation representation represented rhetorical Ricoeur rules sense serve simply social society speaking specific status story structure style sublime suggests symbolic tell temporality theoretical theory things thinking thought tion traditional true truth understanding whole wish writing