In the previous two lectures we investigated important developments in academic history writing which reflected a growing critique of modernist norms, morals and values in post-WWII Western societies. This lecture continues this investigation, turning to even more radical critiques: the ‘linguistic turn’ in France (1960/70s) and the literary criticism of the American literary scholar Hayden White (1970/early 1980). Although methodologically and theoretically different, both theoretical approaches focused on the structure and functioning of language in the understanding of human life and the production of knowledge (including historical knowledge). And both approaches were met with great resistance from historians who considered such theoretical considerations as a lethal threat to the authority of the academic historian and, indeed, the existence of the discipline as a whole.

Why? What was so ‘dangerous’ about the claim by French language theorists that language was an arbitrarily-established system of signs which had continuously evolved throughout human history? Why did historians refuse to contemplate that all human experiences, because they were always expressed in some form of language were therefore relative? Why was Hayden White’s suggestion that no history writing could ever claim to be objective because the historian was doomed to follow fixed narrative plots, greeted with anger and fury? Why was impossible to even contemplate his idea that all history writing is ultimately literature?

The lecture explains the fundamental tenets of the ‘linguistic turn’ and White’s literary critique of modern history writing. It also explores the reasons why historians, including the ‘new’ social historians, microhistorians, and even those using ethnographic methods, had great difficulties to engage with some of these ideas. (Indeed, some historians such as the microhistorian Carlo Ginzburg furiously rejected them outright.) Why?

 

READINGS CAN ALSO BE FOUND HERELink opens in a new window

Texts/Documents/Arguments/Sources

Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’, in ibid., Music, Image, Text (1977)

Hayden White, ‘Historical Text as Literary Artefact’, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Literary criticism (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 81-100. (http://yunus.hacettepe.edu.tr/~jason.ward/ied485britnovel4/HaydWhitHistTextArtifact.pdf)

 

Seminar readings

For an overview see CWHT, ch. 16.

Kantsteiner, Wulf, ‘Hayden White's Critique of the Writing of History’, History and Theory

Vol. 32, No. 3 (Oct., 1993), pp. 273-295

Brown, Callum, Postmodernism for Historians (Harlow, 2005), pp. 32-42 (on signs); pp. 59-68 (discourse); pp. 75-84 (poststructuralism) -- gives a good overview and explains the basics very well. For a list of key terms used in postmodern theory, see 'Brown - Glossary'.

 

Significant Quotations

‘The author is dead.’ (Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, 1967)

‘In Metahistory I aimed to deconstruct a mythology, the so-called science of history’ (Hayden White commenting on Metahistory)

‘The goal of all structuralist activity is to reconstruct an ‘object’ in such a way as to make evident the rules of its functioning.’ (Roland Barthes, The Dealth of the Author, 1967).

They (historical narratives) succeed in endowing sets of past events with meanings, over and above whatever comprehension they provide by appeal to putative causal laws, by exploiting the metaphorical similarities between sets of real events and the conventional structures of our fictions.(Hayden White, ‘Historical Text as a Literary Artefact’, 1973)

 

‘This is what leads me to think that historical narratives are not only models of past events and processes, but also metaphorical statements which suggest a relation of similitude between such events and processes and the story types that we conventionally use to endow the events of our lives with culturally sanctioned meanings. Viewed in a purely formal way, a historical narrative is not only a reproduction of the events reported in it, but also a complex of symbols which gives us directions for finding an icon of the structure of those events in our literary tradition (White, ‘Historical Text as a Literary Artefact’, 1973)

 

‘And our understanding of the past increases precisely in the degree to which we succeed in determining how far that past conforms to the strategies of sense-making that are contained in their purest forms in literary art.’ (White, ‘Historical Text as a Literary Artefact’, 1973)

 

 

Seminar Questions

'Reality can never be expressed'. Discuss.

Is there a universal 'truth' to be found through history writing?

Is historical reality a linguistic construction?

What are the differences between structuralism and post-structuralism?

Why was linguistic theory so challenging for the majority of historians?

What did linguistic and literary theory critique?

Is History just ‘a story’ as Hayden White suggested?

What did Barthes mean by 'the death of the author'?

Do you think the claims of linguistic and literary theorists of the 1960s are still a challenge for history writing today?

 

Further Readings

Anderson, P., The Origins of Postmodernity (London, 1998).

Ankersmit, F. ‘Historiography And Postmodernism’, History & Theory, 28 (1989): 139-53.

Appiganesi, R., & Garratt, C., Postmodern Theory for Beginners (Cambridge, 1995).

Appleby, J., et al., Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective (New York, 1996).

Appleby, J., Hunt, L., and Jacob, M., Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1994), esp. chs. 5 & 6. (strong critique of poststructuralism)

Attridge, D., et al., Post-structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge, 1987)

Barry, R., Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester, 1995).

Barthes, Roland, Mythologies (orig. 1957) (London, 1993).

Barthes, Roland, ‘The Discourse of History’, in K. Jenkins, The Postmodern History Reader (London, 1997), pp.

Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation (orig. 1981, Ann Arbor, 1994).

Bevir, Marc‚ Objectivity in History’, History and Theory 33 (1994),

Boettcher, S. R., ‘The Linguistic Turn’, in G. Walker (ed.), Writing Early Modern History (London, 2005), pp. 71-94.

Bonnell, V.E., and Hunt, L. (eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkely, 1999). (electronic online resource)

Brown, C., Postmodernism for Historians (Edinburgh, 2005).

Brown, C., Postmodernism for Historians (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 33-58. (very readable introduction to all areas of basics of postmodern history writing).

Canning, Kathleen, ‘Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historizising Discourse and Experience’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 19 (1994).

Chandler, D., Semiotics: The Basics (London, 2002). (Excellent introduction)

Chartier, R., 'Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations', trans. Lydia Cochrane (Cambridge, 1988).

Clark, Elizabeth A., History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Lingustic Turn (2004) (very good overview of intellectual development).

Cusset, F., French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis, 2008)

Downs, L.L., ‘Reply to Joan Scott’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35 (1993): 444-451.

 

 

Denzin, N.K, ‘Towards an Interpretation of Semiotics and History’, Semiotica 3-4, 54 (1985): 225-350.

Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference (orig. 1967, London 1997).

Eagleton, T., Ideology: An Introduction (London, 1991); chap. 2-4.

Ermarth, E. D., ‘Agency in the Discursive Condition’, History and Theory 40 (2001): ?.

Eley, Geoff, ‘Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later’, in Terrance J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 193-244; you may also read excerpt in Gabrielle Spiegel (ed.), Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn (London, 2005), pp. 35-61.

Eley, G. & Neild, K., The Future of Class in History. What’s Left of the Social? (Ann Arbor MI, 2007), pp. 57-80.

Elton, G.R., Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study (Cambridge, 1991), esp. ch.2 (strong critique of poststructuralism)

Evans, R., In Defense of History (London, 1997), most influential and widely read critique of postmodernism in History (mainly British)

Fulbrook, M., Historical Theory (London, 2002) (seeks middle ground between postmodernism and its opponents.

Harvey, D., The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1990).

Himmelfarb, G., ‘Some Reflections on the New History’, American Historical Review, 94 (1989), 661-70

Hughes-Warrington, M., Fifty Key Thinkers on History (Abingdon, 2008), Ch. on Hayden White, pp. 388-95.

Hunt, Lynn, 1990 "History Beyond Social Theory," in David Carroll, ed., The States of "Theory": History, Art, and Critical Discourse (Stanford, 1990), pp. 95-112.

Iggers, G. G., Historiography in the Twentieth Century: from Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Middletown CT, 1997), ch. 10

Jameson, Frederic, Postmodernism, Or the Logic of Late Capitalism (Online: http://flawedart.net/courses/articles/Jameson_Postmodernism__cultural_logic_late_capitalism.pdf), a famous and powerful Marxist critique of postmodernism first published in New Left Review I/146, July–August 1984 and as a book in 1991.

Jenkins, K., Ethics and Postmodernity.

Ibid., The Postmodern History Reader (London/New York, 1997).

Jenkins, K., What is History? From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (1995).

Joyce, P., ‘History and Postmodernity’, Past and Present 133 (1991): 204-209.

Ibid., ‚The Return of History: Postmodernism and the Politics of Accademic History in Britain’, Past and Present, 158 (1998): 207-235.

Ibid., ‘The End of Social History?’, in Jenkins, K., The Postmodern History Reader (London and New York, 1997), pp. 341-365.

Kellner, H. ,‘“A Bedrock of Order: Hayden White’s Linguistic Humanism’, History and Theory 19 (1980).

Kirk, N., ‘History, Language, Ideas and Post-Modernism: A Materialist View’, Social History 19 (1994): 221-40.

Konstan, D., ‘The Function of Narrative in Hayden White’s Metahistory,” Clio 11 (1981):

Kramer, L.S., ‘Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominique Capra, in Hunt, L., New Cultural History

LaCapra, D., Kaplan, S.L., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Cornell University Press, 1982) (important collection).

Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (orig. 1979, Manchester, 1984).

Marwick, A., ‘Two Approaches to Historical Study: The Metaphysical (Including “Postmodernism”) and the Historical’, Journal of Contemporary History, 30 (1995): 5-35 (& cf. H. White, ‘Response to Arthur Marwick in idem., 30 (1995), 233-46; & Symposium on the Marwick-White debate in idem., 31 (1996): 191-28 (incl. C. Lloyd, ‘For Realism and Against the Inadequacies of Common Sense: A Response to Arthur Marwick’: 191-207; B. Southgate, ‘History and Metahistory: Marwick versus White’: 209-14; W. Kansteiner, ‘Searching for an Audience: The Historical Profession in the Media Age: A Comment on Arthur Marwick and Hayden White’: 215-219; G. Roberts, ‘Narrative History as a Way of Life’: 221-228

Marwick, A., The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language (Basingstoke 2001).

Munslow, A., Deconstructing History (London, 1997).

Munslow, A., The Routledge Companion to Historical Study (London, 2000). (order)

Norris, C., What is Wrong with Postmodernism: Cultural Theory and the End of Philosophy (Baltimore, 1990).

Passmore, K., ‘Poststructuralism and History’, in S. Berger, H. Feldner and K. Passmore (eds), Writing History: Theory and Practice (London, 2003), 118-40

Palmer, B. Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, 1990).

Paul, H., “Hayden White and the Crisis of Historicism,” in Re-figuring Hayden White, ed. Ankersmit, F., Domanska, E., and Kellner, H. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

Paul, H., Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (2011).

Paul, H.,“An Ironic Battle against Irony: Epistemological and Ideological Irony in Hayden White’s Philosophy of History, 1955–73,” in Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate, ed. Kuisma Korhonen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006).

Poster, M., Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges (New York, 1997).

Price, R., ‘Postmodernism as Theory and History’, in J. Belchem and N. Kirk (eds), Languages of Labour (Aldershot 1997).

Saussure, F., Course in General Linguistics (orig. lectures in 1916, New York, 1959).

Southgate, B., Why Bother with History? (London, 2000).

Southgate, B., History: What and Why? Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Perspectives (London, 1996), pp. 108-122.

Spiegel, G., ‘History, Historicsm and the Social Logic of the Text’ in ibid., The Past as a Text: the Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, 1997), pp. see or/also her excellent piece, ‘History and Postmodernism’, Past and Present 135 (1992): pp. (online). Here she extends her arguments from the Speculum article.

Stedman Jones, G., ‘The Deterministic Fix: Some Obstacles to the Further Development of the Linguistic Approach to History in the 1990s’, History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 19-35.

Stone, L., & Spiegel, G.,1 ‘History and Postmodernism’, Past & Present 135 (1992): 89-208.

Toews, John, ‘Intellectual History After the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience’, American Historical Review, 92 (1987): ?.

Veeser, A., ed. , The New Historicism (London, 1989).

Vernon, J., ‘Who’s Afraid of the “Linguistic Turn”? The Politics of Social History and its Discontents’, Social History 19 (1994): 81-97.

White, R., The Structure of Metaphor: The Way the Language of Metaphor Works (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).

White, Hayden, ‘The Burden of History’, History and Theory 52, 131 (1966): 111-34 (online).

Ibid., The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987).

Ibid., Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, 1999).

Ibid, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978).

Ibid., ‘Manifesto Time’, in K. Jenkins, S. Morgan, A. Munslow (eds.), Manifestos for History (Abingdon, 2007), pp. 220-234. (his reflection on the more recent developments in history writing)

Windshuttle, K., Killing of History: How a Discipline is being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists (San Francisco, 1996) (a problematic critique…so say the least).