"Thinking Historically", A Seminar by Professor Hayden White, Wednesday 22nd February

A special-event seminar given by Professor Hayden White at the invitation of the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology (with the support of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities) .

The seminar is free and open to all - but places are limited. In order to register for a place please e-mail Jana Kakosova by Friday 27 January.

After this date registration will also be open to those outside the Department of HCA.

Theme of the seminar: Hayden White will first give a lecture on Saul Friedlander's Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol 2 "The Years of Extermination", asking whether and how it constitutes a "stable narration" of the Holocaust. Here the emphasis will be on the relation between historical thinking and narration/narrative. The seminar will then open up for questions and discussion, based on the following readings:

1. Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality", Critical Inquiry (1980)

2. "Colloquehistoire": a set of abstracts of papers presented in 2006 at the Ecole des hautes etudes (with English trans) on the relation between factual and fictional discourses and historical writing.

3. "Morrison quote Beloved" is a quotation from Toni Morrison's Beloved, 4th printing, in which she tells of her aim to present, in the form of a Gothic tale, the "historical essence" of women's experience of slavery.

4. Hayden White, "War and Peace: Against Historical Realism" on the relation between history and narrative (literature, fiction) in Tolstoy's novel.

Access to these readings has kindly been supplied in advance by Professor White. They can be downloaded here.