Practice question · Multiple choice
White argues that historians emplot the same events as tragedy or as comedy. Why does that not license the conclusion that any account is as good as any other?
Hints
- Ask what an emplotment is applied TO.
- Can a narrative shape rescue a claim the documents refute?
Show the answer
C. Because emplotment works on evidence that still constrains it
Why
Two levels are in play: which story-shape is imposed, and whether the statements inside it are true. The first is genuinely a choice; the second is not, and that is what stops the position collapsing.
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…
- Complete the settlement.
- 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?