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Part of
Developing New Identities in Social Conflicts: Constructivist perspectives
Edited by Esperanza Morales-López and Alan Floyd
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 71] 2017
► pp. 17–40

Chapter 2
White, Burke and the “literary” nature of historical controversies

In this article, my aim is to investigate the contributions that literary theory, as a theory of each and every type of general discursive construction, can offer to shed light on the nature of historiographical controversies, not only in relation to the difficulty of consensual resolution but to the undesirability of agreeing on a single account of the past. This diagnosis, we can assert, is general and shared; nobody argues, in social sciences and humanities, in favor of the search for a unified theory, or a single account. The question is how to account for the plurality and diversity of interpretations in conflict, and the consequences of this plurality for research itself.

Keywords: history, philosophy of history, constructionism, Hayden White, Kenneth Burke
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Metahistorical controversies about the past
  • 3.A tropological turn in response to some specific but irreconcilable disagreement
  • 4.On the limits of a transcendental reading of tropology
  • 5.Figural causality of tropological drift
  • 6.Controversies as a conversation (in a pragmatistic sense) through tropological drift
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.71.02toz
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Domańska, Ewa, María Inés La Greca, Paul A. Roth, Xin Chen, Veronica Tozzi Thompson & Kalle Pihlainen
2019. Globalizing Hayden White. Rethinking History 23:4 ► pp. 533 ff. DOI logo
Tozzi, Verónica
2018. A pragmatist view on two accounts of the nature of our ‘connection’ with the past: Hayden White and David Carr thirty years later. Rethinking History 22:1 ► pp. 65 ff. DOI logo

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