SOURCE: A review of Figural Realism, in College Literature, Vol. 27, No. 3, Fall, 2000, p. 171.

In the following review, Folks regards Figural Realism as “an eloquent effort” in defense of poststructuralism.

Building upon his previous studies Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978), White's latest book, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, is an eloquent effort to defend an earlier tradition of poststructuralism that has come to seem less and less relevant to the social and historical issues that occupy contemporary critical practice. Drawing on the mid-century criticism of Auerbach, Barthes, Derrida, de Man, and Ricoeur and aligning himself with modernist literary culture, White defends a perspective that has been challenged by New Historical, neo-Marxist, and social agenda critics.

From a historicist perspective, a major difficulty with poststructuralist theory lies in its inability to make distinctions between historical events which, in...