2014—Hayden White
Hayden White began his academic career as a medieval historian, but his relation to narrative studies began to emerge early, in effect as soon as the theory of history became the centre of his scholarly interest, which we can plausibly date to his 1966 essay, “The Burden of History.” His subsequent work assimilated some of the founding ideas of structuralist narratology, and of structuralism more broadly, into a conceptual framework that also drew upon literary formalism and rhetorical theory, and brought it all to bear upon the practice of historiography in a radical critique that culminated in his monumental 1973 book, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century.
In this fertile, provocative work he deployed an illuminating set of taxonomies of emplotment, argument, ideology and tropology, and was already doing more than anyone else at the time to realize narratology’s claim to relevance beyond the literary context in which it had been nurtured; but his subsequent work went beyond an insistence upon the narrative form of historical discourse, effectively speaking back to narrative theory itself. In a sustained series of ground-breaking essays collected in Tropics of Discourse (1978), The Content of the Form (1987), and Figural Realism (1999), he shed new light not only upon historiography but also upon questions of narrative form—and its rhetorical, ideological and ethical force—that resonate powerfully through contemporary narrative theory, and have given back with interest the inspiration he first took from its literary manifestations.
Many of these essays are landmarks in the field, and I need only intone some titles: &landmarksquo;The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” (1974); “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” (1980); “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory” (1984); “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth” (1992); and “Auerbach's Literary History: Figural Causation and Modernist Historicism” (1996). If there was a frisson to his polemical subversion of the conventional hierarchy of history and fiction, his ideas cut both ways; and there is much in them that also challenges received conceptions of fictionality. It’s entirely apt, then, that his most wide–ranging collection of essays, from 2010, is titled The Fiction of Narrative.
He is a superb exponent of the essay form, continually innovative, insightful and suggestive; and so I have great pleasure in presenting the 2014 Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award to Hayden White.
––Richard Walsh 2014 Narrative Society Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology