Hayden White is widely considered to be the most influential historical theorist of the twentieth century. The Ethics of Narrative brings together nearly all of White's uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, revealing a lesser-known side of White: that of the public intellectual. From modern patriotism and European identity to Hannah Arendt's writings on totalitarianism, from the idea of the historical museum and the theme of melancholy in art history to trenchant readings of Leo Tolstoy and Primo Levi, the first volume of The Ethics of Narrative shows White at his most engaging, topical, and capacious.
Expertly introduced by editor Robert Doran, who lucidly explains the major themes, sources, and frames of reference of White's thought, this volume features five previously unpublished lectures, as well as more complete versions of several published essays, thereby giving the reader unique access to White's late thought. In addition to historical theorists and intellectual historians, The Ethics of Narrative will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities in such fields as literary and cultural studies, art history and visual studies, and media studies.
By:
Hayden White
Foreword by:
Judith Butler
Edited by:
Robert Doran
Imprint: Cornell University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 19mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781501764745
ISBN 10: 1501764748
Pages: 282
Publication Date: 15 August 2022
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Unspecified
Introduction: Hayden White, History, and the Ethics of Narrative 1. The Problem with Modern Patriotism 2. Symbols and Allegories of Temporality 3. The Discourse of Europe and the Search for a European Identity 4. Catastrophe, Communal Memory, and Mythic Discourse: The Uses of Myth in the Reconstruction of Society 5. Figura and Historical Subalternation 6. The Westernization of World History 7. On Transcommunality and Models of Community 8. Anomalies of the Historical Museum or, History as Utopian Space 9. Figural Realism in Witness Literature: On Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo 10. The Elements of Totalitarianism: On Hannah Arendt 11. The Metaphysics of Western Historiography: Cosmos, Chaos, and Sequence in Historiological Representation 12. Historicality as a Trope of Political Discourse: Rhetoric, Ethics, Politics 13. Exile and Abjection 14. The Dark Side of Art History: On Melancholy 15. Against Historical Realism: A Reading of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace
Hayden White (1928-2018) was Professor Emeritus of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His books include Metahistory, Tropics of Discourse, The Content of the Form, Figural Realism, and The Practical Past. Robert Doran is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Rochester, the author of The Ethics of Theory and The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, and the editor of Hayden White's The Fiction of Narrative. Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
Reviews for The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1998–2007
The Ethics of Narrative is a significant posthumous collection of Hayden White's writings. Those of us who care about White will be grateful to Doran for so conscientiously undertaking this legacy groundwork. * American Literary History *
