May 11, 2009
Scholars echo Hayden White’s influence
june.avignone@rochester.edu
Robert Doran, (above) assistant professor of French and comparative literature, joined other scholars from around the world in saluting the work of former Rochester historian Hayden White (top) during a two-day colloquium April 24 to 25. Doran says: “White posed the nettlesome and controversial question, ‘Why do we write history?’”
“All stories are fictions,” wrote Hayden White, a professor of history at the University from 1958 to 1968—and considered by many to be one of the most revolutionary thinkers in the humanities in the last 40 years.
In honor of White and his contributions, scholars from around the world—representing diverse areas of history, philosophy, modern languages, literature, and art—participated in a comprehensive two-day colloquium at the University last month. The event was sponsored by the University’s Humanities Project, which emphasizes the influence on and contributions of the humanities to academic and civil life.
Since the 1973 publication of Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, White’s ideas have revolutionized thinking about historical representation and the intersection of history and literary studies. White, who is professor of comparative literature at Stanford University, is known for going beyond the surface level of historical text to a deeper structural level of linguistic form.
“White posed the nettlesome and controversial question, ‘Why do we write history?’ at a time when historians did not want to deal with the question,” says Robert Doran, assistant professor of French and comparative literature who studied under White at Stanford. “His challenge to history was that it is not a science, or a story told only in facts, but rather a form of discourse that relies on conventional narrative forms and the imagination.”
Doran, the editor of a forthcoming volume of essays by White titled The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957-2007, says no other historian has had the interdisciplinary influence of White.
Learn more about other upcoming Humanities Projects events at www.rochester.edu/College/humanities.
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