Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each claim: the weak (absorbed) narrativist claim or the strong (rejected) one?
Groups: Weak claim, absorbed · Strong claim, rejected
- Narrative form carries meaning the evidence did not supply
- Historians are responsible for the shape they impose
- History’s truth-claims are no different from a novel’s
- The evidence cannot rule any emplotment out
- Your story’s shape is an argument, noticed or not
- History is properly a branch of literature
Hints
- One version is now standard training; the other was rejected.
- The rejected version denies any distinction from fiction.
Show the answer
Weak claim, absorbed: Narrative form carries meaning the evidence did not supply, Historians are responsible for the shape they impose, Your story’s shape is an argument, noticed or not
Strong claim, rejected: History’s truth-claims are no different from a novel’s, The evidence cannot rule any emplotment out, History is properly a branch of literature
Why
The left column is now standard training. The right column broke on one fact: novelists may invent and historians may not. That asymmetry is the whole difference and narrativism never dissolved it.
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…
- Complete the settlement.
- Match each of White’s emplotments to the shape it imposes.
- 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?