In the article, Hayden White is addressing Georg Iggers’ criticisms by reemphasizing his belief that history is not a science. White has proposed two major assertions to support his stand. Firstly, White propounds that historical writing is not based on scientific logic connection, but largely dependent on imagination, a process that has more in common with literature than it has with science. Secondly, he argues that historical representation is usually written in the form of a narrative, where historians will fictionalize and create meanings for historical events, therefore making history writing more similar to literature than to science. In this reaction piece, I will be responding to these two arguments that he has proposed to justify …show more content…
398). I disagree with this definition because it will equate history to fiction. Instead, I determine the concept of ‘imagination’ more as a form of hypothetical invention that is based on intellectual historical knowledge. Using my idea of ‘imagination’, I would agree that knowledge-based imagination is present in the writing of history. In fact, it is an inevitable phenomenon in the writing of history because there are always gaps in historical knowledge due to the absence of certain primary sources or the figurative nature of language that causes ambiguity in the meanings of historical events. Therefore, historians have to include their own intellectual guesses and hypothetical constructs to fill in such gaps and these ‘knowledge-based imaginations’ are presented in the form of interpretation in their …show more content…
Simply put, ‘history writing’ will then become fiction writing, where the element of historicity in the writing does not matter anymore. However, I believe the significance of history writing is to put ‘history’ in the center of the topic of discussion, where the idea of historicity, or ‘the truth’, is the most important core in the study of history. Therefore, professional historians should make sure they differentiate interpretation from information to retain the truth-telling function of their
Michael Cunningham’s “White Angel” is not merely a story about two boys growing up in a small town in Ohio in the 1960s. This is a story about the shattered innocence of America through historical events in their era, such as, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Vietnam War. The narrator of this story is nine year old boy, Bobby or “Frisco,” who symbolizes the somber reality of the history of this decade. This character takes risks although they are thoughtfully calculated. He views the world with great admiration through his older, sixteen year old brother Carlton; yet is still analytical over the choices Carlton makes before his untimely death. In this story, Carlton represents the wild and free innocence
Some critics argue that Capote was being pretentious when he suggested that he had invented the form of writing which blends the fact/fiction barrier. In the Columbia University Forum, Charles Alva Hoyt pointed out that what was called a "new literary genre," was simply a plain old reinterpretation of the art of writing history. What Mr. Capote thinks he has discovered is already known to the world by a different name: history. History is the art of telling the truth, selectively (so that the reader may not strangle on vast accumulations of data) and gracefully (so that the reader will want to read in the first place).
The study of past events have been a common practice of mankind since the verbal telling of stories by our ancestors. William Cronon, in his article “Why the Past Matters,” asserts that the remembrance of the past “keeps us in place.” Our individual memories and experiences shape how we act in our daily lives. In addition to influencing us at an individual level, our collective history binds us together as a society. Without knowing where we have been or what we have experienced, it is nearly impossible to judge progress or know which courses of action to pursue. The goal of the historian is to analyze and explain past events, of which they rarely have firsthand memory of, and apply the gained knowledge to make connections with current and future events.
With that, we are able to examine readings and can ask ourselves if this really could have taken place exactly how it is being portrayed. Although the books seem as if they are written as an autobiography or “diary”, they are actually fictional books and should not be used as stand-alone text in a classroom. Even though these books do bring much knowledge to a classroom and allow students to learn about historical events they otherwise may not have, they only provide one insight to the
It is in this instance, and others like it that we see another example of the importance of historicity. By studying these works, we can gain insight into ancient cultures, and even hypothesize about the past. If a work is highly historically accurate in other respects, it might lead one to believe that the other accounts in the work are accurate. Through this method, we may discover some of history through works of literature, history that records may not contain. Yet through this method we can only speculate, we cannot be certain of the accuracy of our results.
In her novel The Daughter of Time Josephine Tey looks at how history can be misconstrued through the more convenient reinterpretation of the person in power, and as such, can become part of our common understanding, not being true knowledge at all, but simply hearsay. In The Daughter of Time Josephine claims that 40 million school books can’t be wrong but then goes on to argue that the traditional view of Richard III as a power obsessed, blood thirsty monster is fiction made credible by Thomas More and given authenticity by William Shakespeare. Inspector Alan Grant looks into the murder of the princes in the tower out of boredom. Tey uses Grant to critique the way history is delivered to the public and the ability of historians to shape facts to present the argument they believe.
imaginations, the story and the characters themselves always appear in the reader's own isolated vision of what is being represented on the page. A very unique and rather brilliant aspect of novels that is thoroughly and well presented in A Separate Peace.
New historicism is premised upon an ideological attempt to wed the practice of history and literary criticism. In this type of textual analysis, the literary work is juxtaposed with historical events (characteristic of the time period in which the work was produced) in an effort to understand the implications within the text. This line of inquiry serves to recover a "historical consciousness" which may be utilized in the rendering of literary theory. "Poems and novels came to be seen in isolation, as urnlike objects of precious beauty. The new historicists, whatever their differences and however defined, want us to see that even the most unlike poems are caught in a web of historical conditions, relationships, and influences."[1] Such an introspective framework ultimately contributes to a wide variety of conceptualizations in literary analysis; such as Marxism, Feminist criticism, and post-structuralism. This attempt to contextualize literary works in a historical manner is also supplemental to more conventional types of literary analysis such as deconstructionism. New historicism, however, tends to be representative of a postmodern project which inevitably leads scholars to question the application of historical concepts as an ideological tool in literary analysis. The attempt to establish a connection between a literary text and historical event is often reflective of the paradigms characteristic to the practice of writing history. These paradigms foster a notion of exclusivity which may actually hinder a literary analysis. Such an introspective framework ultimately contributes to a wide variety of conceptualizations in literary analysis; such as Marxism, Feminist criticism, and post-structuralism....
The background of any historical figure is very important to understanding any subsequent literary recreation of them, for example facts may be altered to make the reader or view more sympathetic to a character, or on the flip side they may become more hostile through a manipulation of the facts.
In The Houses of History, many different schools of historical thought are presented and light in shed on what exactly it means to be those different types of historians. Not all historians think the same way or approach history from the same perspective, but some similar groups of thought have converged together and have formed the various types of historians that will be presented, such as empiricists, psychohistorians, oral historians, and gender historians. All of these groups can approach the same event or concept and look at them in an entirely different way simply due to the way the historical approach they are accustomed to views things.
Thesis statement: While the ancient Greek historians made great strides in perfecting the writing of history, the Roman historians (and the Greek historian writing Roman history) continued perfecting the art of writing good history.
In Austerity and social (in)security in Latvia¸ Jeffrey Sommers provides a convincing analysis of Latvia’s experiment with austerity. Following the global economic crisis of 2008, there has been wide debate over the role of austerity measures in promoting recovery, an ap-proach that has been implemented in countries across Europe such as Britain, Spain, and Greece. It is in this context that Latvia has been held up as a role model by Anders Aslund and former Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, who defends his program of cuts and argues for other countries to emulate Latvia in the book How Latvia came through the Financial Crisis. It is this “myth” that Sommers seeks to dismantle. Sommers achieves this by firstly refuting the argument
The. Kaes, Anton. A. "New Historicism: Writing Literary History in the Postmodern Era." Monthly Bulletin 84.2 (1992): 148-58. Web.
Historians look at both sides of the event gaining an understanding of the causes or factors leading to the event itself. Historians thus must produce questions in order to study the past events (Dunn). In April 199...
History is no more confined to a monolithic collection of facts and their hegemonic interpretations but has found a prominent space in narratives. The recent surge in using narrative in contemporary history has given historical fiction a space in historiography. With Hayden White’s definition of history as a “verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse” literature is perceived to be closer to historiography, in the present age (ix). History has regained acceptance and popularity in the guise of fiction, as signified by the rising status of historical fiction in the post colonial literary world.