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 s

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

Good stories are explorations of the human condition; thrilling voyages into foreign minds.

If Ricoeur is right about the need for narrative to represent time, White insists that Ricoeur’s emphasis on narrative as “found” and not “constructed” avoids the necessarily political nature of narrative construction. “What is imaginary about narrative representation is the idea of a centered consciousness looking out on to the world and represent