Past Looking

Abstract

In ‘The Burden of History’, an essay which is by now over two decades old, Hayden White argues that one of the most important activities for all critically aware historians—confronted as they are with the positioning of their discipline somewhere between art and science — is to strive to make the presentation of their material consistent with ‘the techniques of analysis and representation which modern science and modern art have offered for understanding the operations of consciousness and social process’. White is understandably reticent about providing examples, either imagined or paraphrased, but he does confidently assert that ‘there have been no significant attempts at surrealistic, expressionistic, or existentialist historiography in this century … for all of the vaunted “artistry” of the historians of modern times’. The result of this lack of historiographic experimentation ‘has been the progressive antiquation of the “art” of historiography itself’.1