Hayden White

"In a seminal study published in 1980, 'The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,' Hayden White deconstructs the conventional view of history as a story of some kind, suggesting instead that events in themselves, prior to their finding a place in the historical record, are lacking in narrative value. White hypostasizes historical reality as 'mere sequence' (24), and he suggests that the annalist, with his reliance on chronological order, comes closest to rendering its unorganized truth. For us, by contrast, he argues, for whom narrative form has become so deeply naturalized and internalized that we unthinkingly accept it as the mark of the real, history is properly historical only when it achieves the shape and closure of a story."*

Ah...I'd forgotten White...and how much we all embraced him in historiography...and how much that disturbed Dr. Sanders. Such a long, long journey into existentialism.

*Eakin, Paul John. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.