The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

Reading the works of Hayden White as an undergraduate student was what first awakened me to the idea that writing history meant doing something more than ‘telling it like it is’ or recounting the past ‘as it really was.’ Books like this one taught me that we need to reckon with the fact that we bring our own ways of thinking to the table whenever we try to tell stories about the past. We rely upon the tropes and topoi of different genres—from triumph to tragedy—and even our reliance upon narrative risks distorting the inherently non-story-like features of past reality. Taken together with the contributions of Paul Ricoeur, the writings of Hayden White have helped me to understand that if we want to make sense of history, we first have to make sense of the way we structure time itself in terms of storytelling.