Hayden White Quotes

Don't you ever touch her again," Bodee says. There must be muscles in his arms where before I thought there was only T-shirt. But it's not those muscles that pin Hayden against the ground: it's the white-hot fury that's as visible as Hayden's grimace.

The closest that either Voltaire or the other historical geniuses of the age -- Hume and Gibbon -- came to understanding unreason's creative potentialities was in their Ironic criticism of themselves and in their own efforts to make sense out of history. This, at least, led them to view themselves as being as potentially flawed as the cripples they conceived to be acting out the spectacle of history.

But he did make progress. For example, he directed a contest to choose a female architect to design the Woman’s Building for the fair. Sophia Hayden of Boston won. She was twenty-one years old. Her fee was the prize money: a thousand dollars. The male architects each got ten thousand. There had been skepticism that a mere woman would be able to conceive such an important building on her own. “Examination of the facts show[s] that this woman had no help whatever in working up the designs,” Burnham wrote. “It was done by herself in her home.

One indicator of the self-conscious dissociation of radicals like Gitlin and Hayden from reformers like King is that neither of them, nor any other white student activist, sos leader, or anti-war spokesman was in Memphis for the demonstrations King was organizing in 1968 at the time he was killed.. In fact, no one in the New Left (at least no one who mattered) could still be called a serious supporter of King in the year before he was assassinated.

In order to qualify as historical, an event must be susceptible to at least two narrations of its occurrence. Unless at least two versions of the same set of events can be imagined, there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened. The authority of the historical narrative is the authority of reality itself; the historical account endows the reality with form and thereby makes it desirable by the imposition upon its processes of the formal coherency that only stories possess.

The genres were Romance in Michelet, Comedy in Ranke, Tragedy in Tocqueville, and Satire in Burckhardt.

the philosophers of history privileged particular tropes, or figures of speech: Marx emphasized Metonymy and Synecdoche to organize the historical field, whereas Nietzsche relied on Metaphor and Croce on Irony.

Most important, White rejected the idea that one genre or trope was more appropriate for some historical event than another. He likewise rejected the idea that one genre or trope more accurately corresponded to what really happened in the past than another. Instead, he insisted that tropes were how writers prefigured the historical field—the past became available to us only through a poetic act of construction.

Hayden bites his lower lip white. When he lets go, the pain of his capillaries reopening is exquisite, plush warmth flooding his mouth. Unintentionally, Horatio lingers too long, presses into Hayden's mouth with exploratory curiosity, and Hayden's eyes snap open, a low moan dislodging from his throat. Horatio? he thinks, and even in his mind his voice is edged roughly, hoarse from lack of breath and Horatio wants... He wants. He doesn't have the words for what he wants, but Hayden's mouth is parted and inviting, and he doesn't shudder away when Horatio pushes deeper, traces a sharp line across the sensitive skin of his inner lip, works at the clench of his jaw until his mouth is loose and open and spit-slicked with his own want.

Hayden White ... has argued that the narratives historians develop and use are constructed fictions; they do not reflect any reality of the past because 'real events do not offer themselves as stories'. The dominance of the narrative form among historians ... reflects a larger problem: our desire to make the past tidy and contained in a way that does not, and cannot, represent reality. By framing our historical interpretations as narrative ... historians endow the past with a false sense of coherence

[Hayden] white argues instead for histories that avoid narrative closure and that highlight the contingency of the past ... He points especially to chronicle - a form marked by a lack of closure - as a useful alternative to the narrative. In a chronicle, historians offer an interpretation of the past but simply end the account when they reach the present.

If one if is going to “go to history,” one had better have an address in mind rather than go wandering around the streets of the past like a flaneur. Historical flaneurisme is undeniably enjoyable, but the history we are living today is no place for tourists. If you are going to “go to history,” you better have a clear idea of which history, and you had better have a pretty good notion as to whether it is hospitable to the values you carry into it.

I turned on one foot and pulled William away from the stares of everyone and I flipped Wyatt the bird as we walked away.

I don't care what your name is. My name is Anne and I am the boy-toy's sister," Anne snarled.

Las historias, llevadas a término, son exploraciones de los límites de la legitimidad.

las historias, llevadas a término, son exploraciones de los limites de la legitimidad.

NIGHT, DEATH, MISSISSIPPI By Robert Hayden 1. A quavering cry. Screech-owl? Or one of them? The old man in his reek and gauntness laughs – One of them, I bet – and turns out the kitchen lamp, limping to the porch to listen in the windowless night. Be there with Boy and the rest if I was well again. Time was. Time was. White robes like moonlight In the sweetgum dark. Unbucked that one then and him squealing bloody Jesus as we cut it off. Time was. A cry? A cry all right. He hawks and spits, fevered as by groinfire. Have us a bottle, Boy and me – he’s earned him a bottle – when he gets home. 2 Then we beat them, he said, beat them till our arms was tired and the big old chains messy and red. O Jesus burning on the lily cross Christ, it was better than hunting bear which don’t know why you want him dead. O night, rawhead and bloodybones night You kids fetch Paw some water now so’s he can wash that blood off him, she said. O night betrayed by darkness not its own CHAPTER FOUR THE LYNCHING OF JESSE WASHINGTON: "Haven't I one friend in this crowd?

NIGHT, DEATH, MISSISSIPPI By Robert Hayden 1. A quavering cry. Screech-owl? Or one of them? The old man in his reek and gauntness laughs – One of them, I bet – and turns out the kitchen lamp, limping to the porch to listen in the windowless night. Be there with Boy and the rest if I was well again. Time was. Time was. White robes like moonlight In the sweetgum dark. Unbucked that one then and him squealing bloody Jesus as we cut it off. Time was. A cry? A cry all right. He hawks and spits, fevered as by groinfire. Have us a bottle, Boy and me – he’s earned him a bottle – when he gets home. 2 Then we beat them, he said, beat them till our arms was tired and the big old chains messy and red. O Jesus burning on the lily cross Christ, it was better than hunting bear which don’t know why you want him dead. O night, rawhead and bloodybones night You kids fetch Paw some water now so’s he can wash that blood off him, she said. O night betrayed by darkness not its own

What happened to the troubled young reporter who almost brought this magazine down The last time I talked to Stephen Glass, he was pleading with me on the phone to protect him from Charles Lane. Chuck, as we called him, was the editor of The New Republic and Steve was my colleague and very good friend, maybe something like a little brother, though we are only two years apart in age. Steve had a way of inspiring loyalty, not jealousy, in his fellow young writers, which was remarkable given how spectacularly successful he’d been in such a short time. While the rest of us were still scratching our way out of the intern pit, he was becoming a franchise, turning out bizarre and amazing stories week after week for The New Republic, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone— each one a home run. I didn’t know when he called me that he’d made up nearly all of the bizarre and amazing stories, that he was the perpetrator of probably the most elaborate fraud in journalistic history, that he would soon become famous on a whole new scale. I didn’t even know he had a dark side. It was the spring of 1998 and he was still just my hapless friend Steve, who padded into my office ten times a day in white socks and was more interested in alphabetizing beer than drinking it. When he called, I was in New York and I said I would come back to D.C. right away. I probably said something about Chuck like: “Fuck him. He can’t fire you. He can’t possibly think you would do that.” I was wrong, and Chuck, ever-resistant to Steve’s charms, was as right as he’d been in his life. The story was front-page news all over the world. The staff (me included) spent several weeks re-reporting all of Steve’s articles. It turned out that Steve had been making up characters, scenes, events, whole stories from first word to last. He made up some funny stuff—a convention of Monica Lewinsky memorabilia—and also some really awful stuff: racist cab drivers, sexist Republicans, desperate poor people calling in to a psychic hotline, career-damaging quotes about politicians. In fact, we eventually figured out that very few of his stories were completely true. Not only that, but he went to extreme lengths to hide his fabrications, filling notebooks with fake interview notes and creating fake business cards and fake voicemails. (Remember, this was before most people used Google. Plus, Steve had been the head of The New Republic ’s fact-checking department.) Once we knew what he’d done, I tried to call Steve, but he never called back. He just went missing, like the kids on the milk cartons. It was weird. People often ask me if I felt “betrayed,” but really I was deeply unsettled, like I’d woken up in the wrong room. I wondered whether Steve had lied to me about personal things, too. I wondered how, even after he’d been caught, he could bring himself to recruit me to defend him, knowing I’d be risking my job to do so. I wondered how I could spend more time with a person during the week than I spent with my husband and not suspect a thing. (And I didn’t. It came as a total surprise). And I wondered what else I didn’t know about people. Could my brother be a drug addict? Did my best friend actually hate me? Jon Chait, now a political writer for New York and back then the smart young wonk in our trio, was in Paris when the scandal broke. Overnight, Steve went from “being one of my best friends to someone I read about in The International Herald Tribune, ” Chait recalled. The transition was so abrupt that, for months, Jon dreamed that he’d run into him or that Steve wanted to talk to him. Then, after a while, the dreams stopped. The Monica Lewinsky scandal petered out, George W. Bush became president, we all got cell phones, laptops, spouses, children. Over the years, Steve Glass got mixed up in our minds with the fictionalized Stephen Glass from his own 2003 roman à clef, The Fabulist, or Steve Glass as played by Hayden Christiansen in the 2003

seven months that she had gone without him had just been a haze and those precious moments with him were her clarity. She remembered all too clearly what it felt like to walk through the world feeling as if she had walked out of Technicolor into black and white. That was life with and without Brady. By the time she was supposed to meet with Savannah for dinner, Liz was just happy to have an excuse not to have to be around Hayden. He knew she was off. Her focus was shot, and half of the time it felt as if she were listening to him underwater. She told him that she was having dinner with Savannah, which got her raised eyebrows from Hayden. “Where are you going?” Hayden asked curiously. Liz shrugged. “I don’t know. She just asked if I wanted to go.” “Strange.” “Is it?” Liz asked, wrapping her arms around her middle. She couldn’t seem to get herself straight. “I mean, I know y’all are friends, but I didn’t think you guys really hung out like that.” Liz shrugged again. She didn’t know what else to do. “She asked me. I said I’d go.” “Are y’all meeting anyone else?” he asked. He seemed to be trying for casual, but they had been together too long for her not to get what he was asking. “I don’t think so.” She really had no idea. “Not her brother?” Liz’s eyes bulged. There was no fucking way that was happening. “No. Why

turned around, wrapping my arms around myself, chilled from the early morning breeze that blew through the open window. Hayden lay sprawled out on his stomach with one leg hanging off the bed. He had had another nightmare last night, one that shook him so deep he woke up thinking he was back in the desert during the war. I carefully crawled over him, pulling the sheet up to his waist. In his sleep, he reached out for me, wrapping his arm around my side. I wiggled close to him, tracing his tattoos with my finger until I drifted back to sleep.   * * *   “Riss,” Hayden said an hour later. “We need to workout.” I pretended to be asleep. I was comfortable and didn’t want to get up, let alone get up and do physical work. Not yet at least. “Riss,” he repeated. The closet door closed. “Get up. We have the new A1s with us today.” Begrudgingly, I opened my eyes. Hayden stood by the bed wearing black athletic shorts and a white t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He had an iPod in his hand. “I’m up,” I grumbled and went to the closet, yanking a tank top off

I go through her bag and retrieve her white dress, and I stuff it into the bottom of my bag. She’ll never find it here. This dress is for my eyes only. I’m done with Hayden Whitmore.

Readers of histories and novels can hardly fail to be struck by their similarities. There are many histories that could pass for novels, and many novels that could pass for histories, considered in purely formal (or, I should say, formalist) terms. Viewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another. We cannot easily distinguish between them on formal grounds unless we approach them with specific preconceptions about the kinds of truths that each is supposed to deal in. But the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history.

Historians are concerned with events which can be assigned to specific timespace locations, events which are (or were) in principle observable or perceivable, whereas imaginative writers – poets, novelists, playwrights – are concerned with both these kinds of events and imagined, hypothetical, or invented ones.

In fact, I would argue that these mythic modes are more easily identifiable in historiographical than they are in 'literary' texts. For historians usually work with much less linguistic (and therefore less poetic) self-consciousness than writers of fiction do. They tend to treat language as a transparent vehicle of representation that brings no cognitive baggage of its own into the discourse.

This movement between alternative linguistic modes conceived as alternative descriptive protocols is, I would argue, a distinguishing feature of all the great classics of the 'literature of fact.

Now, I want to make clear that I am myself using these terms as metaphors for the different ways we construe fields or sets of phenomena in order to 'work them up' into possible objects of narrative representation and discursive analysis. Anyone who originally encodes the world in the mode of metaphor, will be included to decode it – that is, narratively 'explicate' and discursively analyze it – as a congeries of individualities.

The process today gives everyone a chance to participate,” Tom Hayden, by way of explaining “the difference” between 1968 and 1988, said to Bryant Gumbel on NBC at 7:50 a.m. on the day after Jesse Jackson spoke at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta. This was, at a convention that had as its controlling principle the notably nonparticipatory idea of “unity”, demonstrably not true, but people inside the process, constituting as they do a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite, tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is. They tend to prefer the theoretical to the observable, and to dismiss that which might be learned empirically as “anecdotal”. They tend to speak a language common in Washington but not specifically shared by the rest of us. They talk about “programs”, and “policy”, and how to “implement” them or it, about “trade-offs” and constituencies and positioning the candidate and distancing the candidate, about the “story”, and how it will “play”. They speak of a candidate’s performance, by which they usually mean his skill at circumventing questions, not as citizens but as professional insiders, attuned to signals pitched beyond the range of normal hearing: “I hear he did all right this afternoon,” they were saying to one another in the press section of the Louisiana

These qualities—Chanel-ness, classic-ness, little-ness, red-ness, and jacketness—become elements of the jacket’s identity.

But in their zeal to know the truth about their pasts, the historians of the nineteenth century were too successful.

historicism, originally invented to discover the origins of the nation in a magical symbiosis between a land and its human inhabitants, ended by identifying the nation with the state, thereby making possible that peculiar form of state-patriotism that is the mark of modern totalitarian regimes.

I check my email. Once more, nothing from my brother Hayden. My nearly empty glass follows me to my bedroom, and I lie there, half asleep, half woozy from too much alcohol. I run my hand through my hair. I’m back on the Walla Walla. The images are fuzzy, like an old VHS tape. Hayden is asleep, and I gently lift him away, deeper into a nest of paper towels. I turn in the dim light of the ferry bathroom and hold up my hair with one hand. I reach for the scissors and start cutting. Locks fall like autumn leaves over the dingy countertop and into the bottom of the pitted white sink. I cut, and I cut. Tears roll down my cheeks, but I don’t make a sound. I open a box of dye and apply it with the thin plastic gloves that come in the box. I smell the chemicals as my hair eclipses from brown to blond. I rinse in the sink, the acrid odor wafting through the still air of the bathroom. I tear a ream of paper towels to wring out the water and then, in what I think is a brilliant move, I turn on the hand dryer and rotate my head against the hot spray of air. I am in Maui. I am in Tahiti. I’m on the beach and I have a tan. A handsome boy looks at me and I smile. The dryer stops, and I look in the mirror and I see her. Mom. I look just like my mother. It was unintended genius. Hayden, now awake, seems to agree. “I miss Mom. Do you think they found Dad?” I indicate the second box of hair dye. “Your turn, Hayden.” He climbs up on the counter and lays his head in the sink as I wet his hair with lukewarm water. It reminds me of when he was a baby and Mom washed him in the sink instead of the tub. He scrunches his eyes shut as I rub in the dye. When I’m done, he will be transformed. He’ll no longer be the little boy with the shock of blond hair, the one that makes him look like he’s stepped out of the page of a cute kids’ clothing website. I look down at the name on the dye box.

Far from providing us with grounds for choosing among different conceptions of history, the human and social sciences merely beg the question of history’s meaning, which, in one sense, they were created to resolve. Therefore, to appeal to sociology, anthropology, or psychology for some basis for determining an appropriate perspective on history is rather like basing one’s notion of the soundness of a building’s foundations on the structural properties of its second or third story.

myths, or more specifically, archetypal plot-structures of the kind found in divinatory, poetic, and fictional discourse.

The historical account thus pretends to two kinds of truth: (1) truth as fact; and (2) truth as story.

it is a convention of historical writing since Herodotus to treat the plot-type or genre by which the events are endowed with story-meaning as if this plot were inherent in the events themselves and was simply “discovered” rather than “invented” by the author

the postulation of an agent behind every activity is not difficult to arrive at.

what is to count as a phenomenon for this field of investigation.

by the “authority” of what is called “the community (of professional) historians.

it is the later that not only reveals the historical meaning of the earlier

It is a conceit of narrativity that the characters can never foresee the ending from the vantage point of any position prior to its manifestation as ending, either as catastrophe

Mate. He’d told Hayden he would stick to his routine. That meant watching the game at her apartment on Sunday and maintaining their friendship. His logical mind fought against his growing urges. Last night, he couldn’t have a simple conversation without touching her. And she didn’t make things any easier. He could smell the desire pouring out of her. It took every ounce of his self-control to hold himself back. At times, it was painful. “I know what I’m doing. I’ve got the situation under control.” Cam laughed. “Like you did yesterday? Dude, we both know it’s only going to get worse. You’re like a ticking sex bomb.” Deep down, Kaden knew he was right. Annabelle would become an irresistible, unquenchable thirst. Ordinarily, she would feel the same pull, but there was no way to know how a human would react. “There’s no such thing as a sex bomb.” Cam spread himself flat across the sofa with his arms crossed behind his head. “Yeah, well, there definitely should be.” “Be serious.” He sat up. “I’m trying to tell you, it’s foolish to fight the bond between you. You’d be better off going with it and letting the panties drop where they may.” And what would happen if he did bond with her? There was no chance it would ever work out between them. He had to hide who he was from the world. A life with him meant Annabelle would have to lie to her friends and family about their relationship. He would never be able to marry her or give her the children she wanted. They’d talked about her dreams for a white picket fence and a family. Even if she were willing to give up those things, wouldn’t he be putting her life in danger? A dull ache formed in the pit of his chest. “You know that’s not possible.” If he could somehow push away these human emotions of his, maybe he stood a chance of keeping her in his life. Maybe someday he could actually be happy for her if she found a suitable mate. He dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands at the thought of her with a human. “I have to go. She’s waiting for me.” “Don’t forget the condoms,” Cam shouted out. “Matter of fact, you might want to double up. With all your pent-up frustration, there’s bound to be an explosion.” “Hilarious,” he replied, shutting the door behind him as he made his way toward his truck. Once inside, he slid his seat belt on and leaned back against the head cushion with his eyes closed. Filled with self-doubt, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to handle it. But he had to. For the sake of everyone he loved, he had to find a way.

Fuhrman moved to Coeur d’Alene, just outside of Hayden Lake, Idaho, a notorious mecca for white supremacist militias. He works for Fox News as its “forensic and crime scene expert,” but his principal function these days seems to be acting as an antidote to the Black Lives Matter movement.

the boy had killed only eight. The presence of a lone FBI agent only complicated the situation more. What had he been doing there? Eyewitness reports of a brief firefight outside before the massacre only piqued his curiosity. A frenzy of reporters and news cameras had flooded the scene outside, held at bay by tight-lipped crowd control officers. Detective Harper noticed that Darion had failed to upload his video in time. After recovering the busted-up GoPro, he viewed the recording and was met with gruesome scenes of the carnage—death captured in real time. Harper placed it in a sealed evidence bag to be transported to the evidence room with everything else. The detective did a Hail Mary and then tried to get some ID on the shooter. Nothing on the scene directly linked him to a terrorist network. He had no identification on him. Suddenly, Harper heard on his radio that another man, who resembled the diner gunman, had been hit by a truck, not far from the diner. *** Craig tried his best to maintain control of the crash site. He called Patterson repeatedly but only got voicemail instead. A sick feeling brewed in his stomach as he heard sirens blare from a few blocks over. Police were everywhere on the street around him. Paramedics had the driver of the truck—an unconscious white-haired man—on a wheeled stretcher and fitted into a neck-and-shoulder brace. As they pushed him to the ambulance, one EMT held an oxygen pump over the man’s face and pumped intermittently. Rasheed lay in the road unconscious among broken pieces of the truck’s front end and a backpack full of pipe bombs. It was a surreal scene, the second time Craig found himself in the middle of the street amid destruction and chaos in a matter of days. The tide seemed to be turning against him. He forbade investigators to touch the pipe bombs and demanded that the paramedics handle Rasheed with the utmost care.

boils.” Terrin didn’t jump at the interruption of his thoughts, but only because he’d come to expect it. The voice was perky and upbeat and annoying as all hell. He closed his eyes for a moment, gathered his patience and turned to face Petty Officer Third Class Francesca Hayden, apparently the most cheerful and effervescent computer technician in the whole Spartan Navy. Even when she was standing still, she gave the impression of constantly bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Pardon?” he said, the actual content of her words lost in his irritation. “It’s just a saying my great grandmother used to tell me,” she clarified, still grinning brightly, her teeth almost painfully white in the glare of the temporary lighting they’d set up in the auxiliary control center down on the third level of the Terminus facility. There’d been too much damage to the primary control center from the fight with Starkad, and this one had come with actual, physical input terminals instead of haptic holograms. “If you watch a pot of water on the stove, it seems like it takes forever to boil, you know.” “I don’t believe I’ve ever had the occasion to boil water on a stove,” he admitted. He winced, realizing it made him sound like a privileged douchebag, and he amended the statement. “I mean, in college, I made my own meals sometimes, and in the lab at the university, but those were all just ready-made heat-n-eat bowls.” He shrugged, trailing off. Why did she always have this effect on him? She was no different than any other tech. Okay, maybe she was cute, if you were into the whole pixie look, with her bobbed brown hair and upturned nose and the impish grin. She certainly did nice things to a set of blue Navy utility fatigues but that could have been the effect of months away from civilians. He glanced around the control room to see if any of the other technicians had noticed his embarrassment, but the only two he could see looked to be absorbed in their work. “I love a home-cooked meal,” she went on as if he hadn’t

here among them the americans this baffling multi people extremes and variegations their noise restlessness their almost frightening energy how best describe these aliens in my reports to The Counselors disguise myself in order to study them unobserved adapting their varied pigmentations white black red brown yellow the imprecise and strangering distinctions by which they live by which they justify their cruelties to one another charming savages enlightened primitives brash new comers lately sprung up in our galaxy how describe them do they indeed know what or who they are do not seem to yet no other beings in the universe make more extravagant claims for their importance and identity

view the past as a vast, inchoate, fragmented, decontextualized, and synchronic congeries of forms, media, genres, and ideas that can be treated as objets trouvés

narrate and emplot the events to which they refer,

historiography was treated as a branch or department of rhetoric,

a new genre, the novel, in which the mixture of the kinds, of genres, plot structures, voices, modes, and meanings

preexisting narrative archetypes and storytelling conventions prevalent in a particular cultural tradition

emplotment—made famous by Metahistory but introduced slightly earlier19—draws attention to the manner in which the historian selects, interprets and ultimately values facts/ events according to the extrinsic, nonfactual, and aesthetico-moral constraints of narrative form

History writing, historical narrative, is thus a hybrid of scientifically ascertained facts and value-bearing, fictional plot-types derived from the literature, legends, myths, and so on, of a given culture. This idea of the “content of the form” in White’s phrase (and eponymous book), the notion that the form used to articulate the historical particulars could affect, shape, and even constitute historical understanding or historical reality,

stories have to be invented; they are not found.

Ethics, or the development of, awareness of, and compliance with general norms of what is right or wrong,

For postmodernists, truth is a semantic, rather than an epistemological issue.

dilemma

tropology.

there is a reality, but it possesses no meaning apart from that which is imposed upon it by human agency.

Only historians know—and they prefer not to mention it—that history is nothing but a construction, that the imagined genetic relationship between the historical past and the present is an illusion, and that the principal social function of historical studies, in their scientific or rather scientistic form, is to provide a basis for the belief that whatever is has good reasons for being what it is, and that anyone who wants things to be different than they in fact are can be dismissed as a utopian or,

a principle that tells us which principle to apply for the satisfactory resolution of an ethical or political dilemma.

linear, cyclical, dialectical, or fractal—

determined by the narrator’s need to show figural aptness

it is the later that not only reveals the historical meaning of the earlier as precursor but also derogates the earlier as merely a precursor—

combination of truth and meaning that is the aim of every properly historical reconstruction.

He solves the problem of presentation (Darstellung) rhetorically, by adopting the “form” of those myths (mythoi = plots, stories) inherited from the Hellenic past as proper containers for recounting the deeds of gods and heroes.

For the telling of a story one needs not so much a set of concepts as, rather, some organizing metaphors.

For in their definition, theory is a viewing, a traveling to see, a spectating, a going to consult an oracle, a judging of one thing by another, a contemplation, a consideration, a—well, a looking at something.

a philosophical tradition of anti-figuralism that extends from Hobbes through Locke, Descartes, Kant, and Comte, to Russell and early Wittgenstein.

In this wish or desire for what Locke called a “historical, plain” style, Levi puts himself within a philosophical tradition of anti-figuralism that extends from Hobbes through Locke, Descartes, Kant, and Comte, to Russell and early Wittgenstein.

a specifically literary mode of writing can heighten both the referential and the semantic valences of a discourse of fact.

What is the status of real events presented as describing the plots of the kinds of stories found in folklore, myth, and literature?

it shows how even the most rigorously objective and determinedly “clear” and literal language cannot do justice to the Holocaust without recourse to myth, poetry, and “literary” writing.

there are as many different “ways of seeing” (to cite John Berger’s popular book and television series) as there are perspectives on the world, and that in order to mediate among different ways of seeing, we need to think theoretically about seeing, which means, above all, that we must not take the naturalness of seeing for granted.

emplotting the course of the subject’s development according to structures of meaning of the kind found in myth, fiction, and literary writing

emplot the events they wish to present as objects of historical interest,

For it is only as enfigured that historical reality can take on an aspect of a meaning

The real issue in assessing a given emplotment of historical reality is the relative adequacy and ethical import of a representation of it as an instantiation of one or another of many plot-types: tragedy, romance, comedy, farce, or satura.

The real issue in assessing a given emplotment of historical reality is the relative adequacy and ethical import

And this is why one can presume to write an authoritative account of historical reality in the form of a narrative. The narrative is the discursive form in which the figure-fulfillment model for construing the relationship between any past and any putative present endows it with the value of sequence in equivalence and equivalence in sequence.

The unbinding of rhetoric from service to the good was an achievement of the Renaissance, as represented in the thought of Valla and Machiavelli.

Hobbes and Descartes, through Locke, Kant, and on to Russell, early Wittgenstein, and Husserl, figurative language has been excoriated as the cause of all error in thought and of all impropriety of language use in discourse

Rhetoric is a theory of the production of truth and meaning by discursive means,

insofar as a historian casts his account of a given set of events in the form or a tragedy or comedy, he has abandoned the ground of fact and gone over to mythification.

plot-type that allows what might appear as only a series of events to be grasped as a complex interplay of sequentiation and equivaluation.

The use of any one of these models or any combination of them to describe a historical entity can at best transform it into a representation of the experience of “within-time-ness”:

what any narrative representation of historical reality allegorizes is the very plot-types that are used within the Western literary tradition to endow temporal processes with different kinds of meaning.

Ricoeur defines narrative as the form of discourse in which the human experience of temporality achieves expression in language.

Narrative alone can capture the complex interplay of existential choice,

Tolstoy is dealing with a caste of aristocrats with which he had completely identified, which he admired, and whose ideals he shared.

Tolstoy does not seem to envision the possibility of a kind of heroic realization of a potential given at birth, after the manner of the hero of the Western Bildungsroman.

Tolstoy in fact notes that there are no beginnings or endings in history, only a stream of happenings that historians break up in different ways, and out of which they make stories, quite arbitrarily.

Kutuzov is the incarnation of active passivity, while Napoleon is nothing other than a passive activist.

Thus the one wills his victory through passivity, the other his defeat through action.

White can be considered, variously, as a structuralist, a poststructuralist, or a postmodernist, depending on which aspect of his work is being described.

Stories are not lived; there is no such thing as a real story. Stories are told or written,

the imagination is a faculty—as Kant saw—of the same caliber as reason—

the surface of the historiographic discourse:

dramatic weight

belied the myths of progress, enlightenment, and humanism sustained by professional historians in the service of the state and bourgeois society since the time of the French Revolution.