Hayden White and/in France: receptions, translations, questions^*

Abstract

The work of Hayden White has been discussed in France starting in the 1980s. The scholars most responsible for its introduction have been the philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the historian Roger Chartier. Several historians and literary theorists have followed in Ricoeur’s and Chartier’s footsteps, praising White for having opened new ways of looking at history, while criticizing some aspects of his work, especially his relativism and his categorization of history as fiction. These debates, however, had not led to translations of White’s work into French, the sole exception being the introduction to Metahistory, published in 2009 in the journal Labyrinthe. By translating several essays, interviews, and reviews written or given by White between 1966 and 2014, I sought to fill this lack. Rendering White’s writing into French did not raise major difficulties. The process, however, did make visible a few problems related to Anglo-American classifications, as well as to the fact that the participants in the conversation do not always seem to be talking about the same subject matter.

Keywords:

• Hayden White
• fiction
• literature
• narrative
• pluralism
• relativism

Notes

1. Information provided by Hayden White and François Hartog in email messages of February 20 and 24, 2017.

2. For the linguist and literary theorist Régine Robin (2003, 296, 297), the problem of White’s models is different: they fall under ‘1970s structuralism,’ and White has not significantly adjusted them over the years.

3. White responded to Chartier in ‘A Rejoinder: A Response to Professor Chartier’s Four Question,’ Storia della Storiografia 27 (1995), 63–70. Reprinted in Chartier 1997, 28–38.

4. According to the email message I received from Loriga on 11/25/2017.

5. Kalifa (2015, 582) makes the same error when he writes, as part of the entry ‘Narrative’ in the Dictionnaire de l’historien: ‘1973: the American Hayden White, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University, publishes Metahistory…’ In 1973, White was at Wesleyan University, in the state of Connecticut. On the contribution of White to ‘history’ strictly speaking, see Vann 2009.