Sublime

Hayden White expresses what I believe is a sympathetic critique of Ricoeur’s ideas.

The problem with White’s understanding lies in his conception of narrative structures, which draws heavily and fatally, I believe, on structuralism. Thus, White wants to show that history and myth have important common elements in utilizing imaginative resources in their ‘configuration’, as it were, but both are also limited by the structural form

The form of narrative addresses the human need to live in time, to express ‘historicality’, which refers to the urge to reach back into our past to change our future and see our life as a whole. Historicality, for Ricoeur, is the way we grasp our most basic potentialities as individuals and collectives by repetition or recollection that guides or

All humans have a past however they represent it; modern historiography is as dependent on imagination as myth or ritual and other ways of giving meaning to the past. Narrativization is not only an act of historicality – it is simultaneously about power. However, in his important contribution about the ideological function of history, White tends

History by now in our culture means academic history, and academic history is less than two centuries old. Suppose it were the case that the catastrophe of which my hypothesis speaks had occurred before, or largely before, the founding of academic history, so that the moral and other evaluative presuppositions of academic history derived from the

Our story arcs are a legacy from the Greeks, who gave us tragedy, a genre built on rises and falls that peak with a climax. Aristotle called the moment of maximum intensity peripeteia — which translates to reversal — and named the aftermath catharsis, the release of emotional energy. That’s how we all know pride comes before fall and that the