What White seems to have just done is to lay a foundation for a science of the academic study of history. He brought in specific terminology, used specific examples, clarified his categories, created a schema in which historians have and will work out of, and further, declared the basic "language" (meaning the method of communication between historians as well as the historian and her subject: the event, time period, collection of events and so on.) and even upholds a method of dissecting the direction or purpose of the historian and her history.
It is difficult to address such a large (in thought, terminology) without getting into a constant range of clarifying what my words mean and how my discourse is to clarify White's essay: for example, if I am to speak of a Historian's relationship to history, I am inherently speaking of the her language (tropology as White puts it), her ideology, her method of explanation (romance, satire, tragedy and so on) and finally her method of emplotment (organicist, mechanistic, idiographic, contextualist).
White's progressive explanation of each of these categories is thorough and complete. Simply, I'll try and go through each one of his his above mentioned categories.
Primarily, and most importantly (though he doesn't reach this until the final pages of the essay) a Historian is influenced by her language, its meaning (by this I mean a sort of semiotics hinting at sign and signified), its use of metaphor, metonym, synecdoche and irony. All four of these terms, White states, operate through a signification through difference and similarity. Primarily stemming from the understanding that
Following a suggestion of Kenneth Burke, we may say that the four "master tropes" deal in relationships that are experienced as inhering within or among phenomena, but which are in reality relationships existing between consciousness and a world of experience calling for a provision of its meaning. metaphor, whatever else it does, explicitly asserts a similarity in a difference and, at least implicitly, a difference in a similarity.
Further, this use of language and tropology upholds a certain direction or purpose, which is connected to the historian's ideology. This ideology asserts certain politic, motivations, directions, and so on for the historian. White notes that there are four varieties of ideologies that historians may fall into: Anarchist, Conservative, Radical, and Liberal. What is interesting to me is that White seems to be asserting that language is more powerful than ideology, but further, that seperating one's self from ideology is near impossible. It seems to me that there is a difference here between a sort of political ideology (the purpose, unconscious or conscious) that the Historian maintains and the Althusserian ideology that gives the historian her role, responsibilities, ethos, and relation to her surrounding environment.
To be sure, I agree with White in his thought that Language (semiotics) as a massively influential subject, however, I want to stress a sort of relativism that may arise in this sort of thinking, the farther back you push a concept the more it is influenced by another. And this is probably his reasoning for asserting an unlikelihood of pinning down a primary influencer for the Historian: per individual the reasoning may change, but further, it is indescribably difficult to gauge amount of influence upon a historian concerning these categories.
Continuing, White explicates various methods, or stories that these histories may take the form of. What is particularly interesting here is the differentiation between a plot, and a story (myth). White notes how stories are influenced or given by a historian's ideology and further expressed through a tropology that gives deeper meaning to the myth and the characters within it. I feel that White is correct in his understanding of how various stories are told, and the relationship with historical bias through various methods of telling the story (romantic, tragic, satrical, comedic, and so on). A certain expanatory lens gives different meaning to the story. As White noted, a historian make understand a war to be decided through a certain political move, but this political move will be understood through the story in relation to other events both before and after the event itself. And so, the flavor, or position that this event upholds is formed through certain molds or forms given by the story (myth.)
Putting all of this together and completing the process of historical interpretation is the role that emplotment takes within this process. Emplotment refers to the method in which the historian embraces certain information and neglects other, it refers to how the historian presents certain historical time periods, tangible dates or time periods, it refers to the historian's understanding of how these events, dates, important notions, concepts, people all related to one another: in sort emplotment is concerned with how historical information is presented and why it is presented. Interestingly, White noted how various methods of emplotment: Idiographic, Organicist, Mechanistic, and Contexualist. the Idiographic method refers to a more spotted , and selevtive re-telling of history; Organicist understands historical events to be in a much more narrative sense, where the parts are all related to a certain whole and everything fits well together; Mechanistic is best represented through Marx, and his notion that history is best understood as as sort of part to part relationship through a cause and effect scheme. This cause and effect scheme requires that each part be looked at in relation to another and the corresponding relationship be understood as either causual in one manner or effective in another. Finally, the contextualist understand historical events to be in relation to a broader context:
When an event is set within its "context" by the method that Walsh has called "colligation," the historian's explanatory task is said, on this analysis, to be complete. The movement towards intergration of the phenomena is supposed to stop at the point at which a given context can be characterized in modestly general terms.
Wrapping up, White's text understands interpretation by a historian to include these four areas: Mode of Emplotment, Mode of Explanation, Mode of Ideological implication and finally the mode of language. The final mode seems to be the strongest, in that it governs how metaphor, metonymy, synedoche, and irony are understood through emplotment, explanation, and ideological influence.
To be sure, I agree with White in his thought that Language (semiotics) as a massively influential subject, however, I want to stress a sort of relativism that may arise in this sort of thinking, the farther back you push a concept the more it is influenced by another. And this is probably his reasoning for asserting an unlikelihood of pinning down a primary influencer for the Historian: per individual the reasoning may change, but further, it is indescribably difficult to gauge amount of influence upon a historian concerning these categories.
Continuing, White explicates various methods, or stories that these histories may take the form of. What is particularly interesting here is the differentiation between a plot, and a story (myth). White notes how stories are influenced or given by a historian's ideology and further expressed through a tropology that gives deeper meaning to the myth and the characters within it. I feel that White is correct in his understanding of how various stories are told, and the relationship with historical bias through various methods of telling the story (romantic, tragic, satrical, comedic, and so on). A certain expanatory lens gives different meaning to the story. As White noted, a historian make understand a war to be decided through a certain political move, but this political move will be understood through the story in relation to other events both before and after the event itself. And so, the flavor, or position that this event upholds is formed through certain molds or forms given by the story (myth.)
Putting all of this together and completing the process of historical interpretation is the role that emplotment takes within this process. Emplotment refers to the method in which the historian embraces certain information and neglects other, it refers to how the historian presents certain historical time periods, tangible dates or time periods, it refers to the historian's understanding of how these events, dates, important notions, concepts, people all related to one another: in sort emplotment is concerned with how historical information is presented and why it is presented. Interestingly, White noted how various methods of emplotment: Idiographic, Organicist, Mechanistic, and Contexualist. the Idiographic method refers to a more spotted , and selevtive re-telling of history; Organicist understands historical events to be in a much more narrative sense, where the parts are all related to a certain whole and everything fits well together; Mechanistic is best represented through Marx, and his notion that history is best understood as as sort of part to part relationship through a cause and effect scheme. This cause and effect scheme requires that each part be looked at in relation to another and the corresponding relationship be understood as either causual in one manner or effective in another. Finally, the contextualist understand historical events to be in relation to a broader context:
When an event is set within its "context" by the method that Walsh has called "colligation," the historian's explanatory task is said, on this analysis, to be complete. The movement towards intergration of the phenomena is supposed to stop at the point at which a given context can be characterized in modestly general terms.
Wrapping up, White's text understands interpretation by a historian to include these four areas: Mode of Emplotment, Mode of Explanation, Mode of Ideological implication and finally the mode of language. The final mode seems to be the strongest, in that it governs how metaphor, metonymy, synedoche, and irony are understood through emplotment, explanation, and ideological influence.
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