The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007-2017

by Hayden White, Robert Doran (Editor), Mieke Bal (Foreword by)

Overview

The second volume of The Ethics of Narrative completes the project of bringing together nearly all of Hayden White's uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, including articles, essays, and previously unpublished lectures. As in the first volume, volume 2 features White's trenchant articulations of his influential theories, as well as his explorations of a wide range of ideas and authors at the frontiers of critical theory, literature, and historical studies. These include the concept of utopia in history, modernism and postmodernism, constructivism, the conceptualization of historical periods such as "the Sixties" and "the Enlightenment," the representation of the Holocaust in scholarly and literary writing, as well as essays on Frank Kermode, Saul Friedländer, and Krzysztof Pomian.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501773587
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	01/15/2024
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Hayden White (1928–2018) was Professor Emeritus of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His books include Metahistory, Tropics of Discourse, The Content of the Form, Figural Realism, and The Practical Past.

Robert Doran is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Rochester, the author of The Ethics of Theory and The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, and the editor of Hayden White's The Fiction of Narrative and Philosophy of History after Hayden White.

Mieke Balis Professor Emerita of Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam, where she cofounded the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and is a video artist.

Table of Contents

1. The Future of Utopia inHistory [2007]
2. Reflections on "Gendre" in the Discourses of History [2009]
3. Postmodernism and Historiography [2009]
4. Anomalies of the Canon in Modernity [2011]
5. Modern Politics and the Historical Imaginary [2012]
6. Historical Fictions: Frank Kermode's Idea of History in The Sense of an Ending [2012]
7. The Substance of the Sixties [2013]
8. The History-Fiction Divide in Holocaust Studies [2014]
9. The Limits of Enlightenment: Enlightenment as Metaphor and Concept [2014]
10. Outcasts, Monsters, and Simulacra of History [2015]
11. Modernism and the Sense of History [2016]
12. Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief: On Saul Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews [2016]
13. At the Limits of the Concept [2016]
14. Krzysztof Pomian's Modernist Theory of Culture [2016]
15. Constructionism in Historical Writing [2017]
16. Primitivism and Modernism [2017]
17. Is My Life a Story? [2017]

What People are Saying About This

Michael Roth

These late essays explore the core of Hayden White's critical ethics, which aims to inspire the 'liberation of the present' from the 'burden of history.' White's work remains a potent provocation.

Michael S. Roth

These late essays explore the core of Hayden White's critical ethics, which aims to inspire the 'liberation of the present' from the 'burden of history.' White's work remains a potent provocation.

Frank Ankersmit

For Hayden White, historical narratives owe their meaning to their aesthetic or literary and to their ethical or political substructures. During his lifetime White published predominantly on the literary dimension of narrative. We must therefore be immensely grateful to Robert Doran for having edited these two volumes of White's essays on the 'ethics of narrative.' They truly constitute the apotheosis of White's uniquely influential historical thought. And Doran's brilliant introduction to the second volume offers a truly unsurpassed survey of White's historical thought: clear, very well informed, comprehensive, and well-argued.