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January 29, 2005
Introduction in Hayden :-)
The Introduction begins with the idea that discourse always tends to slip away from the structures of consciousness and resists coherency. Then Hayden White tries to define the terms "tropes" and "discourse" and differentiate the two. Troping is "both a movement from one notion of the way things are related to another notion, and a connection between things so that they can be expressed otherwise."(White, 2) Discourse is "the genre in which the effort to earn this right of exprssion, with full credit to the possibility that things might be expressed otherwise, is preeminent." (2) When discourse is considered as a genre, it can be analyzed on three levels: mimesis (or that of the description of the data), diegesis (that of the argument or narrative), and diataxis (that of the combination of mimesis and diegesis)(4). Furthermore, “Understanding is a process of rendering the unfamiliar familiar; of removing it from the domain of things felt to be ‘exotic’ and unclassified into one or another domain of experience encoded adequately enough to be felt to be humanly useful, nonthreatening, or simply known by association.”(5)
The narrative “I” of the discourse move from "(a.)an original metaphorical characterization of a domain of experience, to (b.)metonymic deconstructions of its elements, to (c.) synecdochic representations of the relations between its superficial attributes and its presumed essence, and finally to (d.)a representation of whatever contrasts or opporsitions can legitimately be discerned in the totalities identified in the third phase of discursive representation",(5) dispersing its elements across a “spatial field” or a "time series"[6]). Sometimes the story of our discovery stops here “in what appears to be a final analytical act” (6). Hayden White also call the “fourth move” of the “I” the “ironic reflection on the inadequacy of the characterization with respect to the elements which resist inclusion in the…ordered totality” (6).
Posted by yqin at January 29, 2005 02:02 PM