Hayden White

Hayden White
Born	Hayden V. White (1928-07-12)July 12, 1928 Martin, Tennessee, US[4]
Died	March 5, 2018(2018-03-05) (aged 89) Santa Cruz, California, US[5]
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Michigan
Influences	Aristotle Max Weber Jean-Paul Sartre Maurice Merleau-Ponty Roland Barthes William J. Bossenbrook[1] Erich Auerbach Northrop Frye Moses Maimonides[2]
Academic work
Discipline	History
Doctoral students	metahistorical trope[3]
Influenced	Sharon Traweek Norman J. Wilson

Hayden V. White (July 12, 1928 – March 5, 2018) was an American

Career

White received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Wayne State University (1951) and his Master of Arts (1952) and Doctor of Philosophy (1955) degrees from the University of Michigan. While an undergraduate at Wayne State, White studied history under William J. Bossenbrook alongside then-classmate Arthur Danto.^[1]

In 1998, White directed a seminar ("The Theory of the Text") at the School of Criticism and Theory.^[6]

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.^[7] In 2000, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.^[8]

Among White's influences, there were two major figures who taught him "how the historian interprets something."

In his seminal 1973 book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, White claimed that the manifest historical text^[jargon] is marked by strategies of explanation, which include explanation by argument, explanation by emplotment, and explanation by ideological implication.^[10] He argued that historical writing was influenced by literary writing in many ways, sharing the strong reliance on narrative for meaning.^[11] Therefore, White contradicts the view that "historiography can be objective or truly scientific in itself, unaffected by anything."

White mentions two figures who have enabled people to ask questions about history's objectivity: Marx and Nietzsche. According to White, these thinkers both use their philosophy to consider history which “not only makes us know something about the historical process but know how it knows it."^[12] They focus on the problem of history. Marx regards the problem of history as the problem of the mode of explanation, while, for Nietzsche, the problem is the problem of the mode of emplotment.^[13] Thus, history is recorded differently depending on which mode the historian chooses. As a result, ‘a value-free history’ cannot exist.^[14] By showing Marx’s and Nietzsche’s argument, White once again emphasizes the importance of the philosophies of history, and history as a well-made or well-constructed narrative.

He insists, in particular in chapter 7, that philosophies of history are indispensable elements in historiography, which cannot be separated from historiography. For him, history is not simply a list of chronological events.

• The Ethics of Narrative, Volume 2: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007-2017. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2023. Ed. Robert Doran, Fwd. Mieke Bal
• The Ethics of Narrative, Volume 1: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998-2007. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2022. Ed. Robert Doran, Fwd. Judith Butler
• 40th Anniversary Edition: Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2014.
• The Practical Past. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 2014.
• The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957-2007. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2010. Ed. Robert Doran
• Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1999.
• "
  American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 5 (Dec., 1988), pp. 1193–1199 (online
  ).
• The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1987.
• "Historical Pluralism", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Spring, 1986), pp. 480–493.
• "The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory", History and Theory, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 1–33.
• "The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 9, No. 1, The Politics of Interpretation (Sep., 1982), pp. 113–137.
• as editor (1982) with Margaret Brose Representing Kenneth Burke. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
• "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1, On Narrative (Autumn, 1980), pp. 5–27.
• Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1978.
• "Interpretation in History", New Literary History, Vol. 4, No. 2, On Interpretation: II (Winter, 1973), pp. 281–314.
• "Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground", History and Theory, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1973), pp. 23–54.
• Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1973.
• The Greco-Roman Tradition. New York: Harper & Row. 1973.
  ISBN 9780060470647
  .
• as co-author (1970) with Willson Coates, The Ordeal of Liberal Humanism: An Intellectual History of Western Europe, vol. II: Since the French Revolution. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970.
• as co-editor (1969) with Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• as editor The Uses of History: Essays in Intellectual and Social History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 1968.
• "The burden of history", History and Theory, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1966), pp. 111–134.
• as co-author (1966) with Willson Coates and J. Salwin Schapiro, The Emergence of Liberal Humanism. An Intellectual History of Western Europe, vol. I: From the Italian Renaissance to the French Revolution. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

References

Further reading

• Doran, Robert (ed.). Philosophy of History After Hayden White, London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
  ISBN 978-1-441-10821-0
• Re-Figuring Hayden White, Edited by
  ISBN 978-0-8047-6003-4
• Doran, Robert. "Metahistory and the Ethics of Historiography," Storia della Storiografia, 65.1 (2014): 153-162.
• Doran, Robert. "The Work of Hayden White I: Mimesis, Figuration, and the Writing of History", The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory, ed. Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot (London: Sage Publications, 2013): 106-118.
• Muszynski, Lisa (2017). Unmaking History-as-Fiction: Decoupling the Two Incompatible Principles of Language in Hayden White's Linguistic Turn, 1970s–2000s (Ph.D. thesis). University of Helsinki.
  ISBN 978-951-51-2593-4
  .
• Ghasemi, Mehdi. “Revisiting History in Hayden White’s Philosophy.” SAGE Open, 2014, 4(3), July–September: 1-7.
• Paul, Herman. Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (Key Contemporary Thinkers), Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.
  ISBN 978-0-745-65013-5
• Pihlainen, Kalle. The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past (with a Foreword by Hayden White), New York: Routledge, 2017.
  ISBN 978-1-138-69746-1
• Pihlainen, Kalle. "The Work of Hayden White II: Defamiliarizing Narrative." The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory, ed. Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot (London: Sage Publications, 2013): 119–135.
• Pihlainen, Kalle. "History in the world: Hayden White and the consumer of history”, Rethinking History 12:1 (2008), 23–39.
• Daddow, Oliver. "Exploding history: Hayden White on disciplinization", Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 1470-1154, Volume 12, Issue 1, 2008, pp. 41–58.
• Finney, Patrick. "Hayden White and the Tragedy of International History", Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association's 49th Annual Convention; San Francisco, CA, USA, March 26, 2008.
• "Hayden White Talks Trash", Interview by Frederick Aldama, Issue #55, May 2001.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Hayden White.

• Bibliography of Hayden White.
• Another Bibliography of Hayden White
• Hayden V. White Papers at University of California, Santa Cruz Special Collections