Complete the settlement.
White observed that the past supplies events but not narrative shape, so historians choose an ______. The weak claim, that this shape carries meaning the evidence never supplied, was absorbed into standard training. The strong claim failed on one asymmetry: novelists may ______ and historians may not. Interpretation therefore operates over an evidentiary ______ that no amount of narrativism dissolves.
Word bank: emplotment · invent · floor · archive · trope
Hints
- The settlement keeps the shape and keeps the evidence.
- Invention remains the line that cannot be crossed.
Show the answer
White observed that the past supplies events but not narrative shape, so historians choose an emplotment. The weak claim, that this shape carries meaning the evidence never supplied, was absorbed into standard training. The strong claim failed on one asymmetry: novelists may invent and historians may not. Interpretation therefore operates over an evidentiary floor that no amount of narrativism dissolves.
Emplotment, invention, floor. Take the shape seriously; keep the footnotes. The discipline came out of the 1990s holding both, which is the right answer and was not an obvious one at the time.
Practise Postmodernism and the Linguistic Turn
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Postmodernism and the Linguistic Turn
- "There is nothing outside the text" is the phrase most often used to dismiss the linguistic turn. Why do…
- White argues that historians emplot the same events as tragedy or as comedy. Why does that not license the…
- Match each of White’s emplotments to the shape it imposes.
- Sort each claim: the weak (absorbed) narrativist claim or the strong (rejected) one?
- On what grounds does the discipline hold that Holocaust denial is wrong rather than merely differently…
- Set aside what the linguistic turn threatened. What did it durably give the discipline?
- Because histories are constructed, any construction is as good as any other.
- What is the decisive asymmetry between a historian and a novelist?