Abstract
In his “Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality,” Hayden White writes “What we postmodernists are against is a professional historiography.” This statement inspired me to reexamine a number of White’s oeuvre from the perspective of postmodernism so as to find out in what ways and to what extent White is a postmodernist. In addition, I highlight a number of preoccupations of professional historiography and argue how White deploys the discourse of postmodernism to dismantle them.
Highlights
Postmodernism appears in many varieties and guises, and it is deliberately hard to define
Because postmodernism maintains that there exists no absolute truth, it follows that there exists no basis for absolute meaning; rather, meanings are individually and/or socially constructed
It is worth noting that to revisit and reexamine the historical texts, postmodernism foregrounds ironies and paradoxes that exist within those texts, mainly because ironies and paradoxes, due to their critical and subversive power, can help the readers and researchers to pinpoint the contradictions within historical texts
Summary
Postmodernism appears in many varieties and guises, and it is deliberately hard to define. Postmodernism rejects professional historians and their belief in the scientific status of history and historiography, teleology, totality, certainty, objectivity, universality, and essentialism.
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