Who Shall Decide, When Doctors Disagree? David Leeson Responds in Turn

Abstract

I don't much to say to Robert M. Stein's response, except maybe this: I'm not entirely convinced historians have overwhelmingly relied on the protocols of nineteenth-century realistic as White and others claimed. Over the last year, while teaching at Laurentian University, I conducted a seminar on topics in the history of nineteenth-century Europe, which included a four-week unit on the Franco-Prussian War and its impact on France. structure of this unit was both chronological and historiographical. first week was devoted to the war itself, and to the traditional military history thereof. second week was devoted to the Paris Commune, and the social history of warfare. third week was devoted to the popular memory of these conflicts during the period of the Third Republic, and the cultural history of warfare. fourth week was devoted to Emile Zola's novel La DBbLicle (1892), which I thought would help illuminate the previous three weeks' topics. This was a fortunate choice: my students were quite enthusiastic about Zola's work. La DBbbcle not only helped reinforce various points made by their historical readings: it made the conflict come alive. All of them agreed the characters and events in the novel seemed real in ways their historiographical counterparts did not. So if contemporary historians are indeed using the protocols of nineteenth-century realistic fiction, they're not using them very well. Having compared the two just recently, I to say I don't see much resemblance between them. Let me now turn to Nancy Partner, who says I just don't understand Hayden White. White wasn't serious when he criticized historians for eschewing the literary techniques of Joyce, Yeats, and Ibsen, she says. He was just teasing. He was just making mischief. One would think, she says, that aRer some thirty years of the linguistic turn, historians might by now learned to recognize rhetorical strategies for what they, rhetoiically, are and not read earnest literal messages when mild shock tactics were intended. Would one indeed? Partner does not support her claims with any proof: she just appeals to her own authority. So let's turn away from Hayden White's early essays, and examine what he says in his most recent collection, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999). Literary modernism did not repudiate narrative discourse but discovered in it a content, linguistic and tropological, adequate to the representations of dimensions of historical life only implicitly perceived in nineteenth-century realism, he says. The ade