Sublime

Hayden White expresses what I believe is a sympathetic critique of Ricoeur’s ideas.

irony: the trope that derives its effect of appositiveness to the description of things by playing upon the relation of opposition.

The problem with White’s understanding lies in his conception of narrative structures, which draws heavily and fatally, I believe, on structuralism. Thus, White wants to show that history and myth have important common elements in utilizing imaginative resources in their ‘configuration’, as it were, but both are also limited by the structural form

All humans have a past however they represent it; modern historiography is as dependent on imagination as myth or ritual and other ways of giving meaning to the past. Narrativization is not only an act of historicality – it is simultaneously about power. However, in his important contribution about the ideological function of history, White tends t

Research is meat to feed the beasts of imagination and invention,

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in people. —Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin

it is a poor sort of past that only deals with what has happened.