History Bump

First thing: I was reading Piaget back in the back-then, and find that White's characterizations of Piaget's theories are... somewhat loose according to my memory. It makes me suspicious that his claims are somewhat more artistic than his academic register makes them sound.
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i'm going to be re-reading piaget in 720, so i might have opportunity to test that theory...

personally, i'm not sure i disagree per se so much as i'm distrustful. this has the look of universalism, "theory of everything"-ness, & i'm inclined to be wary of those no matter how well-intentioned they are.

I am also wary of White's claims of connections. Having recently read Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco and also having read the first part of this introduction which seems to make a claim that our perceptions are controlled by the connections that we want to make (those same connections that drive metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony), it seems somewhat contradictory to offer the consistencies across disciplines. It also seems a little too convenient and neat. I don't like things that are this tidy.

I feel like he's saying, "See, I made a group of four, too; therefore, it must be true; and by implication, they all must be true." It seems to conflict with the part I liked about questioning the tactical rules.

That said, I'm intrigued by the potential usefulness of White's work, whether or not it matches Piaget or Freud or whatnot.

I probably wouldn't frame it as a disagreement, exactly, but I had questions about his regular returning to narrative as the way of ordering history. (Terms seem so dang slippery!) I mean that even when he works on Thompson (after moving through Piaget and Freud as exemplars of tropological prefiguring), White seems to have structuralist leanings toward sequential narrative. Specifically, I'm looking at what he does with Thompson's title ("making") on the bottom of p. 16. Does White have a narrative bias?

Probably yes, he does have that bias--or rather, claim. A decade later, Walter Fisher convincingly argues that narrative (pathos!) is the most persuasive rhetorical technique. Fisher, Walter R. Human Communication as Narration. U South Carolina P, 1987. But White actually is taking it further, I think, than Fisher does. Later in Tropics, though, you'll see White's highly developed skepticism regarding linear narrative.