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Hayden WhiteHayden White is an historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973). He is currently professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. Linguistic skepticism and tropes White rejected the post-R.G. Collingwood philosophy of history by brushing away previous distinctions and debates, and by rejecting the notion of causality in history. He proposed a return to the historical text which, he thought, had been abandoned in favour of the study of other works in the philosophy of history. He asked that historians become "linguistic skepticists (sic)", and that they question their use of language. In Metahistory (1973), White extended the use of tropes from a linguistic usage – figures of style – to general styles of discourse, underlying every historian's writing of history. He believed tropes to be historically determined, in as much as the historiography of every period is defined by a specific trope. White did not see tropes as incompatible with the historian's freedom in his actual writing of history. He justified his position – among other ways – on the basis of the historical unfolding of tropes (from metonymy to metaphor, synecdoche, and finally irony); he placed himself within the ironic historiographical tradition, one that allowed certain elements of the absurd and of contradiction.
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