History Bump

This commitment to narrative and to archival fact means I have had to make constant decisions about what does constitute believable evidence; and in that very basic sense, this book is a critical work. (22)

Here Connors’ statements resonate with White’s building descriptions of Master Tropes (MTs) that shape our historical perspective and therefore control our discourse. (However, White and Connors are looking through the same lens from different angles). Connors is sensitive to how MTs are purposefully used to tell history and how they may potentially influence his telling, but more important for him is investigating the MTs in the historical periods he is studying. I believe this is what he means by his “decision to write this book as history instead of historiography” (21).

White would take up the challenge to analyze the stories told here as a “partner in crime, the reader” (22). However, White’s approach, similar to Connors’, would be to interrogate “the carnivals…and postrational integration” that Connors only suggests here (22). White may argue that these create (perhaps a series) of MTs that informed the decisions Connors made. Both would agree that Connors’ MTs could only be distinguished with a certain critical distance.

White would both applaud and frown on Connors description of his project. I say this because White feels that a historian must stay true to his aim, and in order to locate true answers to the question he seeks, the historian must revisit the past. “The contemporary historian has to establish the value of the study of the past…as a way of providing perspectives on the present…” (White 41). In other words, one who studies the past and not relate that historical perspective to the present adds no value to his aim, and is not seen as an authority of what he speaks. Because Connors delves into the past, White would applaud his efforts.

On the contrary, White would frown because Connors has to decide for himself whether to and how to furnish his readers with certain or even specific details that are relative to his aim. This then becomes a personal choice of information sharing. White insists that a historian has to cater to the social and cultural competence of the discourse community he serves. “Historians…can be said to gain ‘explanatory affect’…by building into their narratives patterns of meaning similar to those more explicitly provided by the literary art of the cultures to which they belong” (58). A historian might render a biased narrative (which Connors says he provides) in order to articulate specific meaning for his audience.

Connors focuses on the "missing" nineteenth century in the history of rhetoric, and White draws on nineteenth century distinctions of art and science to describe the historians' work. So in a sense, both are looking to the same period and trying to draw on its lessons for current academic work. Because Connors distinguishes his work in this text as being "scholarship" not "critical," a move I applaud, I think White would think he was practicing a good historicism. Connors specifically describes the viewpoint he will be taking in the text, setting it in distinction to other histories without critiquing the lenses of those other histories. In this way, Connors allows for the reality of multiple points of view on history, which I think is what White was getting at in explaining the different modes and correlations. Since I don't know how Connors is going to tell his story, I can't yet speak to what tropes he might employ, but knowing that he intended to examine the field with a view to the external (cultural) forces acting on it, I think I can anticipate that White would not have to classify his work as employing bad science or bad art (43). I don't think Connors will be treating his observations as "facts" that are "givens." And because he's looking at the cultural influences on the field, I think White would give him credit for building in the patterns of meaning Aleshia noted above.

White would primarily be disappointed by Connors work, claiming that he possesses a kind of “willful (not sure it necessarily is willful) methodological naivete.” However, White would see Connors on the right page insofar as he 1)does not see history as fixed, 2)insists that we learn from history to create change; 3); 4) acknowledges the complexities of gathering facts through his reflection on methods. White would see Connors at least aware of the problem of the historian—but all to unsure of what to do about it.

White would suggest that Connors, the “epistemologically conservative antiquarian” does not establish a firm place to stand. He vacillates between the scientific (reliance on a “rational and empirical tradition) and artistic tradition (he claims to work from a liberal tradition, quotes Yeats, and emphasizes storytelling) in his writing of history—not historiography (41). Connors purposefully presents his research methods in an indecisive manner. And his description of his methodology seems entirely too parallel to White’s critique of the journalist who plays in the library and mimics the methods of others. Finally, Connors spends more time discussing what he does not do, than what he does: his work does not coincide with recent theoretical work on revision (19); and, it is not really a critical history (insofar as it merely scratches the surface of what is expected by contemporary historians).

White would be skeptical about Connor's work. The fact that Connors presents his work as a history and not a historiography would trouble White. In chapter 2, White discusses the faulty distinction between "proper history" and metahistory saying that the separation is an unproductive one to study and/or claim when writing history. And even though Connors seems to be aware of the problematic of this divide, he attempts to get around it by claiming that he is recovering the facts which his bias allowed him to see. As Kelly states, "White would see Connors at least aware of the problem of the historian—but all to unsure of what to do about it."

Although Connors discusses Master Tropes, and lays out his present bias and the need for history to solidify a past for change in the present, he is still focused on facts, events, and chronology to discuss history. He may acknowledge the "problem" of historical research, but he does not practice a method that can challenge or reform it. It is a move (much like the quick acknowledgement in the beginning of an article of location, race, gender, and place that is supposed to denote an awareness of intersectionality in feminist work), not a method, and White would recognize that and be critical of this work.

I believe White might respond by suggesting that Connors cannot avoid being influenced by ideologies and theories that are working in his realms of experience--that it is not possible to NOT lose his "simple-minded story" (21) in the ideology. I also think White would think it terribly naive of Connors to believe that "rationalist and even empirical kind[s] of traditional textual historical research" (21) are devoid of "vision[s] of the desireable" (22), so that even in his "refusal to adhere" (21) to any of his own, Connors is transmitting them through the histories he reports.

White seems to take a diplomatic stance (or perhaps no stance) with regard to the reporting of history. On the one hand, he claims that the "historian does not bring the notion of the 'story' that lies embedded within the facts (60), but than a page later he asserts that the similarities between the forms are just as important for the understanding of historical interpretation (61). It seems to me that Connor's is attempting to do both, and in that case White would be in total agreement with Connor's attempt at "telling a story".

I think that White would be attracted to Conner's claim that choosing a theoretical stance as a "master trope" limits the usefulness of your work by pinning it to the time when that theory is popular. His choice of trope is theoretical in a way, but he abstracts from the theory and claims a larger significance for his trope of metaphor.
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