Hayden White: Historian

Hayden White was American historian. Explore interesting quotes on historian.

Hayden White: 14 quotes0 likes

“What is at issue here is not: What are the facts? but rather: How are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another? Some historians will insist that history cannot become a science until it finds the technical terminology adequate to the correct characterization of its objects of study, in the way that physics did in the calculus and chemistry did in the periodic tables. Such is the recommendation of Marxists, Positivists, Cliometricians, and so on. Others will continue to insist that the integrity of historiography depends on its use of ordinary language, its avoidance of jargon. These latter suppose that ordinary language is a safeguard against ideological deformations of the ‘facts.’ What they fail to recognize is that ordinary language itself has its own forms of terminological determinism, represented by the figures of speech without which discourse itself is impossible.”

"The fictions of factual representation"

“Historians are concerned with events which can be assigned to specific timespace locations, events which are (or were) in principle observable or perceivable, whereas imaginative writers – poets, novelists, playwrights – are concerned with both these kinds of events and imagined, hypothetical, or invented ones.”

"The fictions of factual representation"

“In fact, I would argue that these mythic modes are more easily identifiable in historiographical than they are in ‘literary’ texts. For historians usually work with much less linguistic(and therefore less poetic) self-consciousness than writers of fiction do. They tend to treat language as a transparent vehicle of representation that brings no cognitive baggage of its own into the discourse.”

"The fictions of factual representation"