The Ethics of Narrative

Hayden White (1928–2018) was Professor Emeritus of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His books include Metahistory, Tropics of Discourse, The Content of the Form, Figural Realism, and The Practical Past. Robert Doran is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Rochester, the author of The Ethics of Theory and The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, and the editor of Hayden White's The Fiction of Narrative. Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Introduction: Hayden White, History, and the Ethics of Narrative

1. The Problem with Modern Patriotism

2. Symbols and Allegories of Temporality

3. The Discourse of Europe and the Search for a European Identity

4. Catastrophe, Communal Memory, and Mythic Discourse: The Uses of Myth in the Reconstruction of Society

5. Figura and Historical Subalternation

6. The Westernization of World History

7. On Transcommunality and Models of Community

8. Anomalies of the Historical Museum or, History as Utopian Space

9. Figural Realism in Witness Literature: On Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo

10. The Elements of Totalitarianism: On Hannah Arendt

11. The Metaphysics of Western Historiography: Cosmos, Chaos, and Sequence in Historiological Representation

12. Historicality as a Trope of Political Discourse: Rhetoric, Ethics, Politics

13. Exile and Abjection

14. The Dark Side of Art History: On Melancholy

15. Against Historical Realism: A Reading of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace