Hayden White's Tropology Research On Literary Theory

Hayden White(1928-2018),a famous contemporary American philosopher,historian and literary critic,explored the deep discourse mechanism behind narrative texts,explored the aesthetic poetics in narrative discourse,and promoted the development of literary criticism and literary creation practice.From the perspective of cultural implication and narrative context,he perfectly combined historiography with literary criticism,which had a profound impact on the literary theory of new historicism.The paper is divided into the following parts:Introduction As a diligent and prolific theorist and critic,Hayden White takes "tropology" as the entry point of his theory,and spreads out around the mechanism of narrative discourse and the extension of narrative discourse.At present,the domestic and foreign research on Hayden White is basically divided into the following three types: the overall review of the theory,the interdisciplinary comprehensive research and the parallel comparative research.First,the origin of Hayden White's tropology theory.Influenced by the Second World War,the decline of history led to Hayden White's thorough reflection on the historical tradition.For a long time,people have been living under the shadow of rigid historical consciousness,which makes it difficult for them to solve various problems creatively in real life.For opponents of history,therefore,it is not only a heavy burden imposed by the past on the present in the form of obsolete ideas,cultures and institutions,but also a way of looking at the world that is imprisoned in the past.With the development of structuralist methodology and the rise of Linguistics Turn,Hayden White,influenced by Saussure and Barth,combined with his own academic tradition and the anthropological research of Kant and Vico,put forward a creative "tropology" discourse theory model.Second,the operation of Hayden White's tropology theory."tropology" was first widely used as a rhetorical concept.On the basis of its original meaning,Hayden White absorbed the research results of vico's human consciousness model and put forward four core concepts: metaphor,metonymy,synecdoche and irony.These four concepts correspond to the four processes of representation description,restoration and deconstruction,comprehensive reproduction and negation and correction in the historical narrative.In essence,historical text can be regarded as a linguistic paradigm that is accepted without criticism,in which the dominant figurative approach and the accompanying linguistic rules constitute the foundation of "meta-historiography".This poetic presupposition is the most important kernel of Hayden White's tropology theory.Third,the extension of Hayden White's tropology theory.Turning a chronicle into a story is a historical narrative.In this process,based on the poetic presupposition of tropology,narrative discourse processes historical events as raw materials into historical texts by means of circumstantial mode,argumentation mode and ideological mode.There are romantic,tragic,dramatic and satirical modes in the model of the genre.The mode of argumentation can be divided into formal wheel,mechanical theory,organic theory and situation theory.The ideological model can be divided into anarchism,radicalism,conservatism and liberalism.Therefore,literary fiction cannot be avoided in historical writing,and this affinity between literature and historical narration is the inevitable reason for tearing down the wall of literary history and achieving the mastery of literary history.In this process,as the extension of tropology,narrative discourse and tropology theory complement each other.Fourth,the theoretical value of Hayden White's tropology.In the traditional concept,the content and the form are independent of each other,and the form is only the carrier of the content,which is a neutral concept.However,Hayden White put forward the proposition of "form with content",believing that beauty is the result of the unification of form and content.As a kind of poetic presupposition,the essence of tropology is a meaningful form that conveys aesthetic implication.Good works are the dialectical unity of truth and beauty.While respecting the historical truth,literary writing should comprehensively use the poetic expression techniques of romance and imagination,which also has important reference significance for the practice of contemporary literary creation.Conclusion Based on the research ideas of the first four chapters,this paper clarifies the poetical nature of tropology theory as a discourse structure,reflects on the cross-boundary research of history and literature,and puts forward some reflections on the new development of contemporary literary theory.