Thomas Harrington
Metaphors And Historical Understanding
There is no such thing as fully objective history, and that’s for a simple reason. History is generated in narrative form, and the creation of every narrative—as Hayden White made clear four decades ago—necessarily involves the selection and discarding, as well the foregrounding and relative camouflaging, of items within the panoply of “facts” at the disposal of the historian.
Moreover, when it comes to constructing these narratives, all who chronicle the past are, whether they are aware of it or not, limited to a great extent by the repertoire of verbal cliches and conceptual metaphors that have been bequeathed to them by the elite institutions of the cultural system in which they live and work.
No comments:
Post a Comment