Re: What makes a writing "Fiction" versus "History"?
Posted: Fri Jun 16, 2017 6:02 pm
I found a book by Monika Fludernik, An Introduction to Narratology, translated from the 2006 German edition by Patricia Häusler-Greenfield and Monika Fludernik in 2009, at
http://glearning.tju.edu.cn/pluginfile. ... %BB%8D.pdf
It covers White and his take on emplotment.
http://glearning.tju.edu.cn/pluginfile. ... %BB%8D.pdf
It covers White and his take on emplotment.
DCH[58] Hayden White
The issue of fictionality in narrative is complex and highly controversial. We may start out from the assumption, as we saw in Chapter 1, that novels, literary films, dramas, [59] oral storytelling, history and autobiography may all be counted as examples of narrative texts. In this connection, Hayden White (1978) emphasizes the constructed nature of written history, an insight which is frequently (and wrongly) interpreted as referring to the fictional nature of historical writing. White contends that the naive view that historical events or facts ‘exist’ and only need to be ‘written down’ by historians goes back to an old-fashioned concept of mimesis, which is – incidentally – a literary notion. Second, he maintains that the so-called historical ‘facts’ and ‘events’ are only constructed by historiographical discourse and then have meaning attributed to them in a plot which is created by the historian. Finally, he claims that this process involves literary-rhetorical schemata which represent the course of history as tragedy, comedy, satire or farce. Since the same topics – the French Revolution, for instance – may be presented as tragedy, comedy or farce, the fictionalizing elements of historical writing are clearly located in the discourse of historiography. This can be analysed narratologically just as a novel can, and shows obvious fictional characteristics. The fictionality of narrative discourse, its teleological structure, its literary and rhetorical features all have no bearing on the truth of the content which is narrated. Every history takes what historians agree upon after the sources have been studied, and interprets this on the basis of speculation or by having recourse to fresh sources or new methods. In contrast to the novel, historical narrative can be proved false if new sources are found. So, the fictionality of history, according to Hayden White, has to do with the similarity between historical writing, especially that of the nineteenth century, and the discourse of the novel. It also derives from the fact that all plots are constructed, including historical plots in history texts.