Quotes from Hayden White

The closest that either Voltaire or the other historical geniuses of the age -- Hume and Gibbon -- came to understanding unreason's creative potentialities was in their Ironic criticism of themselves and in their own efforts to make sense out of history. This, at least, led them to view themselves as being as potentially flawed as the cripples they conceived to be acting out the spectacle of history.

Historians are concerned with events which can be assigned to specific timespace locations, events which are (or were) in principle observable or perceivable, whereas imaginative writers – poets, novelists, playwrights – are concerned with both these kinds of events and imagined, hypothetical, or invented ones.

In fact, I would argue that these mythic modes are more easily identifiable in historiographical than they are in 'literary' texts. For historians usually work with much less linguistic (and therefore less poetic) self-consciousness than writers of fiction do. They tend to treat language as a transparent vehicle of representation that brings no cognitive baggage of its own into the discourse.

This movement between alternative linguistic modes conceived as alternative descriptive protocols is, I would argue, a distinguishing feature of all the great classics of the 'literature of fact.

Now, I want to make clear that I am myself using these terms as metaphors for the different ways we construe fields or sets of phenomena in order to 'work them up' into possible objects of narrative representation and discursive analysis. Anyone who originally encodes the world in the mode of metaphor, will be included to decode it – that is, narratively 'explicate' and discursively analyze it – as a congeries of individualities.

Las historias, llevadas a término, son exploraciones de los límites de la legitimidad.

las historias, llevadas a término, son exploraciones de los limites de la legitimidad.

The genres were Romance in Michelet, Comedy in Ranke, Tragedy in Tocqueville, and Satire in Burckhardt.

the philosophers of history privileged particular tropes, or figures of speech: Marx emphasized Metonymy and Synecdoche to organize the historical field, whereas Nietzsche relied on Metaphor and Croce on Irony.

Most important, White rejected the idea that one genre or trope was more appropriate for some historical event than another. He likewise rejected the idea that one genre or trope more accurately corresponded to what really happened in the past than another. Instead, he insisted that tropes were how writers prefigured the historical field—the past became available to us only through a poetic act of construction.