Ethics of Narrative

Hayden White (1928–2018) was Professor Emeritus of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His books include Metahistory, Tropics of Discourse, The Content of the Form, Figural Realism, and The Practical Past.Robert Doran is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Rochester, the author of The Ethics of Theory and The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, and the editor of Hayden White's The Fiction of Narrative.Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

• Introduction: Hayden White, History, and the Ethics of Narrative1. The Problem with Modern Patriotism2. Symbols and Allegories of Temporality3. The Discourse of Europe and the Search for a European Identity4. Catastrophe, Communal Memory, and Mythic Discourse: The Uses of Myth in the Reconstruction of Society5. Figura and Historical Subalternation6. The Westernization of World History7. On Transcommunality and Models of Community8. Anomalies of the Historical Museum or, History as Utopian Space9. Figural Realism in Witness Literature: On Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo10. The Elements of Totalitarianism: On Hannah Arendt11. The Metaphysics of Western Historiography: Cosmos, Chaos, and Sequence in Historiological Representation12. Historicality as a Trope of Political Discourse: Rhetoric, Ethics, Politics13. Exile and Abjection14. The Dark Side of Art History: On Melancholy15. Against Historical Realism: A Reading of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace

The Ethics of Narrative is a significant posthumous collection of Hayden White's writings. Those of us who care about White will be grateful to Doran for so conscientiously undertaking this legacy groundwork.(American Literary History)