Hayden White Critical Essay | Critical Review by Terry Engebretsen

Critical Review by Terry Engebretsen

SOURCE: A review of The Content of the Form, in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. XXIII, No. 4, Fall, 1989, pp. 377–79.

In the following positive review, Engebretsen summarizes White's theoretical analysis and assertions in The Content of the Form.

The eight essays in this book will be familiar to White's readers, since all have appeared previously. Together, however, they provide more than a convenient collection of White's recent writing; they continue the argument developed in Tropics of Discourse and applied so successfully in Metahistory that history (and the human sciences generally) is thoroughly rhetorical. Rather than stylistic embellishment, the rhetorical code we employ is indistinguishable from our interpretation of events. But these essays focus the issues more particularly. The typologies of trope, emplotment, argument, and ideology from the earlier works here give way to the argument that “narrative, far from being merely a form of discourse that can be...
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