About this title: "Tropics of Discourse" develops White's ideas on interpretation in history, on the relationship between history and the novel, and on history and historicism. Vico, Croce, Derrida, and Foucault are among the figures he assesses in this work, which also offers original interpretations of a number of literary themes, including the Wild Man and the ...
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Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Wrappers
Publisher: John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1978
ISBN-13:9780801827419ISBN:0801827418
Description: As New in None Issued jacket. 8vo. An as new copy of this fine collection of essays on interpretation in history, on the relationship between history and the novel, and on history and historicism. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Pre
Date Published: 1985
ISBN-13:9780801827419ISBN:0801827418
Description: New. BRAND NEW and ready for dispatch. Delivery normally within 4/7 days. Our reputation is built on our Speedy Delivery Service and our Customer Service Team. read more
Edition: 4th printing
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Date Published: 1986
Description: Very Good in None jacket. Softcover. 287 pages. Previous owner's signature on front end paper, faint foxing to top edge, else a clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to wrappers. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Date Published: 01/03/1985
ISBN-13:9780801827419ISBN:0801827418
Description: Used-Good. Book in good or better condition. Dispatched same day from warehouse. Please email with any questions for quick response. read more
Description: New. Tropics of Discourse develops White's ideas on interpretation in history, on the relationship between history and the novel, and on history and historicism. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Date Published: 1978
ISBN-13:9780801821271ISBN:0801821274
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Ex-library. clean text, shelf worn, Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 304 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN-13:9780801827419ISBN:0801827418
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE: All books are promptly imported from the UK using DHL or Royal Mail international mail WITH TRACKING NUMBER. Print on demand title. D elivery is typically 5-10 working days. Please do not select expedited shipping. Professional and reliable bookseller (est.1987). read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN-13:9780801827419ISBN:0801827418
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE: All books are promptly shipped from our UK warehouse using Royal Mail or DHL. International Priority mail for non-UK deliveries. Print on demand title. Delivery is typically 3-5 working days for UK delivery. Heavier or more expensive books are shipped with a TRACKING NUMBER. Professional and reliable bookseller (est.1987). read more
"White analyzes the discourse of historiography-the language employed in the writing of history-calling attention to the generic narrative forms historians use, and how these latter are reflected in the figures of speech or "tropes" the historians deploy."
"In Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Hayden White discusses the problems and promises of history. Human nature has made us curious, cerebral beings. We thrive on questions perhaps even more than we thrive on answers, and it is namely the more problematic issues--culture, society, and history, among others--that intrigue and baffle us. And yet, our "discourse always tends to slip away from our data towards the structures of consciousness with which we are trying to grasp them; or, what amounts to the same thing, the date always resist the coherency of the image which we are trying to fashion of them" (White 1). In other words, the "Big Picture" is often ungraspable, like sand sifting through our fingers. We must grapple with it throughout existence, pass this grappling down through generations just as we have inherited it, and attempt to make sense of our experiences as best we can. White's collection of essays attempt to deal with the tropical element ingrained in all discourse, "whether of the realistic or the more imaginative kind" (1-2). It is this element that White calls "inexpungeable from discourse in the human sciences, however realistic they may aspire to be" (2). He adds that tropic is "the shadow from which all realistic discourse tries to flee" (2).
And yet, this is a hopeless flight, "for tropic is the process by which all discourse constitutes the objects which it pretends only to describe realistically and to analyze objectively. How tropes function in the discourses of the human sciences," ultimately, is at the root of White's essays in this collection (2) . White borrows the idea of tropes and their sundry uses from Harold Bloom, who suggests that a trope is the linguistic equivalent of a psychological mechanism of defense. White adds that troping is both "a movement from one notion of the way things are related to another notion, and a connection between things so that they can be expressed in a language that takes account of the possibility of their being expressed otherwise" (2). Troping is crucial to discourse, the latter being an "effort" to earn a "right of expression" (2). Thus, White says, we can agree with Bloom's contention that "all interpretation depends upon the antithetical relation between meanings and not the supposed relation between text and its meaning" (2).
White uses a "fourfold pattern" rooted in an archetypal structure, also based upon an overlapping of theories from which he draws. The structure requires that a narrative "I" of a discourse move from an original metaphoric characterization of an experience, through metonymic deconstructions of the elements of this experiential domain, and then on to synechdochic representations. In this third stage, the relationship between the presumed essence and its superficial attributes will be, White insists, revealed. The fourth step in the process is the arrival of a representation of "whatever contracts or oppositions can legitimately be discerned in the totalities identified in the third phase of discursive representation" (5). Giambattista Vico, G.W.F. Hegel, and Karl Marx hold similar views, suggesting that, in this final point, this "diataxis of discourse not only mirrored the processes of consciousness but in fact underlay and informed all efforts of human beings to endow their world with meaning" (5). Moreover, Freud's evaluation of the four processes of the dreamwork overlap with White's four tropes of discourse. Hence, the pattern is set; the theorists are aligned (or where they are not, they at least offer an alternative and complimentary look at one another). The final result of Tropics of Discourse is an artful use of the tropes to indicate their function as the signs and stages in the evolution of human consciousness, and how this consciousness evaluates history."
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