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