Herman Paul > Quotes

“It is a conceit of narrativity that the characters in the story can never foresee the ending from the vantage point of any position prior to its manifestation as ending,”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“choices out of the available number of story-forms are made on grounds that are “ultimately aesthetic or moral”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“consciously sought to erase distinctions between form and content, subject and object, past and present.”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“stories are not lived but told”?”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“there are only moral and aesthetic grounds for objecting to a “liberation historiography” that fully allows individuals to “choose a past” in the same way as they “choose a future.”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“White claimed that knowledge makes reality, or rather, that what counts as historical reality is a product of the historian’s language.”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“ultimately aesthetic or moral rather than epistemological” grounds.”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“Moreover, what historians and novelists have in common is that they can choose between various modes of figurative language, that is, between the four modalities of representing relationships available in language.”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“modernist events resist such treatment”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“what counted was not that historians write stories as such; White’s interest was rather focused on the sort of stories historians produce.”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“the need to dream, the importance of stretching the human imagination,”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“Accordingly, it is impossible to maintain that there is only a single “realist” mode of representation.”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“a new interpretation”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“White himself had reflected on the possibilities of non-narrative historical representation when, in his manifesto of 1966, he had speculated about historiographies following the example of Norman Brown, the psychoanalytic historian, or drawing on the artistic styles developed by “action painters, kinetic sculptors, existentialist novelists, imagist poets, or nouvelle vague cinematographers”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“This means that the shape of the relationships which will appear to be inherent in the objects inhabiting the field will in reality have been imposed on the field by the investigator in the very act of identifying and describing the objects that he finds there. The implication is that historians constitute their subjects as possible objects of narrative representation by the very language they use to describe them.21”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“White’s provocative claim that this distinction between “speculative” and “analytical” philosophy of history conceals as much as it reveals. White argued that the former only makes explicit what the latter chooses to leave implicit.”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“The “narrative technique” by which a historian moves from level 3 to level 4 is nothing other than “the techniques of figurative language”:”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“teaches us, said White, “to see in ‘pictures’ rather than in concepts.”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“Following Roland Barthes, then, he considered the historian’s style responsible for the production of a “reality effect.”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“If there is one continuing thread in White’s philosophy of history, it is a fierce rejection of a scientification of history, in the name of what White held to be a higher cause: moral orientation and political commitment.”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“White almost invariably approached narrative from rhetorical, ideological, and political angles, and almost never from an epistemological”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“They did not realize that the facts do not speak for themselves, but that the historian speaks for them, speaks on their behalf, and fashions the fragments of the past into a whole whose integrity is – in its representation – a purely discursive one.”34”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“historical imagination,”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“White’s sweeping statement, in 1975, that “there can be no such thing as a non-relativistic representation of historical reality?”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“had been granted the power to define the real, thereby excluding everything (the miraculous, the grotesque, the utopian) that did not fit the narrative mode favored by historians of the time.”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“the choice of a culture from which one would wish to be descended.”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White

“emplotment follows from prefiguration.”
― Herman Paul, Hayden White