Sublime

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

irony: the trope that derives its effect of appositiveness to the description of things by playing upon the relation of opposition.

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

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 t

Stagnation is the default state of man.

Research is meat to feed the beasts of imagination and invention,

We understand a story’s meaning, in part, by tracking its causality, and a story’s power stems from our sense that its causality is truthful, which is to say, that its internal logic is solid.

And it’s so true it’s trite that human beings are narrative animals: every culture countenances itself as culture via a story, whether mythopoeic or politico-economic; every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized, recountable series of events and changes with at least a beginning and middle. We need narrative like we need space-time;