Narrative Trouble, or Hayden White's Desire for a Progressive Historiography Refigured by Judith Butler's Performativity Theory

• Autores: la Greca, María Inés
• Año de publicación: 2014
• Idioma: inglés
• Tipo de recurso: artículo
• Materia: Hayden White; figural realism; middle voice writing; practical past; Judith Butler; performativity theory
• Institución: Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas

This paper poses the question of what possible desires expressed in Metahistory remain ungratified for Hayden White. In engaging the relationship between White’s later writings on figural realism, middle-voice writing and the practical past, I claim that these more recent topics are concerned with thinking ways for a community to retrospectively appropriate a past for its own project of self-making. Moreover, they also deal with the unavoidably figurative nature of any attempt at historical interpretation as narrativization. In other words, the three topics discuss the poetics of history, the constitution of a link between past, present and future, as a critical shifting between discourse and agency. Within this context, I want to suggest that these later issues are elaborations of something that was already present in Metahistory forty years ago: a desire for a progressive historiography, a writing of history that ironically accepts both the free and conditioned nature of our cultural discursive means for giving ourselves a past that still romantically seeks to transcend its own irony and to imagine a future to call our own. In pursuing this aim, I will claim that a performative theory of (historical) identity inspired by Judith Butler’s work may well be where White’s desire can best be heard.
Fil: la Greca, María Inés. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero; Argentina