The Poetic Dimension Of Historical Narrative

Hayden White(1928—),an eminent contemporary scholar in the sphere of philosophy of history and literary criticism, is considered as the original founder in the New Historism. He has been dominated the linguistic turn in the field of history since the 1970 s. White’s masterpiece Metahistory turns the key focus of western historiography to the historical narrative. With the terminology of literary theory, Hayden White introduces the narrative property of history into literature, and straightens out the boundary in statement between literature and history. Therefore, Hayden White’s thought of historical narrative is a kind of poetic description. It is also a kind of historical narrative, in which we can research the language form of historical writing.In addition to the exordium, this thesis is divided into four chapters.The first chapter discusses the background and thought foundation which result in Hayden White’s historical narrative. This chapter firstly introduces the background of Hayden White’s thought from three aspects, which include the crisis of history, the critique of objectivism narrative theory and historical viewpoint of positivism and the linguistic turn in the field of history. Secondly, the source of Hayden White’s theory is very extensive and critical. He references the “poetic wisdom”, expressionist aeathetics, archetypal criticism and linguistic poetics theory, which increasing the depth and breadth of his thought.The second chapter starts with the poetic nature of Hayden White’s historical narrative, and tries to deeply analyze the poetic dimension of historical narration from two key parts: the modes of interpretation and the discursive tropology. In White’s opinion, interpretation modes of historical texts are divided into three poetic structures, which are plot mode, formal reasoning mode and ideological implication mode. However, the three modes are combined in a specific way, so that the historical texts show a unique style. The tropology of discourse is the deep structure of historical text, and it is also the poetic operation mechanism of historical discourse. Without this kind of mechanism, the word is not functioning properly. Finally, this chapter analyzes the mutual projection relation between historical interpretation mode and the discursive tropology.The third chapter probes into the methodology of Hayden White’s historical narrative thought. Based on the related theories of Hayden White’s historical narrative thought, the exploration in the sense of methodology of White’s theory in this chapter is divided into four aspects: demolition of the “wall” between literature and history, cross-disciplinary research, the combination of external research and internal research, interactive construction of textuality and intertextuality. In a certain sense, these explorations are conducive to promote integrated complementary development of literary study.The fourth chapter is the literary value orientation of Hayden White’s historical narrative thought. Hayden White introduces historical narrative to literature which showing the different character and pursuit with the previous history research, so it has a certain value orientation of literature. With the formalism method, White constructs the theory frame of structuralism, and carries out literature structural analysis of historical narrative mode based on the specific pattern and concept of literary theory. In White’s view, the “poetic logic” narrative behavior used by historians in historical writing determines the poetic essence of historical works. Therefore, White not only regards historical narrative as a process of discourse fiction and imagination, but also attributes this kind of fiction and imagination to a kind of imitation of literature, and eventually all are unified in the “narrative”.The rest of this thesis: Aiming at the question of the historical nihilism, Hayden White thinks that any historical representation should be based on the authenticity of the event, and only in this way can the historical narrative on the standard of moral value judgment be more realistic.