Revisiting History in Hayden White’s Philosophy

: Mehdi Ghasemi

Publisher: SAGE Publications Inc.

: 2014

: Sage open

: Sage Open

: 4

: 3

: 1

: 7

: 2158-2440

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244014542585

: http://sgo.sagepub.com/content/4/3/2158244014542585

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.