Refereed journal article or data article (A1)
Revisiting History in Hayden White’s Philosophy
List of Authors: Mehdi Ghasemi
Publisher: SAGE Publications Inc.
Publication year: 2014
Journal: Sage open
Journal acronym: Sage Open
Volume number: 4
Issue number: 3
Start page: 1
End page: 7
Number of pages: 7
eISSN: 2158-2440
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2158244014542585
URL: http://sgo.sagepub.com/content/4/3/2158244014542585
Abstract
In his “Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality,” Hayden White writes “What we postmodernists are against is a professional historiography.” This statement inspired me to reexamine a number of White’s oeuvre from the perspective of postmodernism so as to find out in what ways and to what extent White is a postmodernist. In addition, I highlight a number of preoccupations of professional historiography and argue how White deploys the discourse of postmodernism to dismantle them.
In his “Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality,” Hayden White writes “What we postmodernists are against is a professional historiography.” This statement inspired me to reexamine a number of White’s oeuvre from the perspective of postmodernism so as to find out in what ways and to what extent White is a postmodernist. In addition, I highlight a number of preoccupations of professional historiography and argue how White deploys the discourse of postmodernism to dismantle them.