Narrativism, as represented by Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit, can fruitfully be analyzed as an inversion of two brands of positivism. First, narrativist epistemology can be regarded as an inversion of empiricism. Its thesis that narratives function as metaphors which do not possess a cognitive content is built on an empiricist, "picture view" of knowledge. Moreover, all the non-cognitive aspects attributed to narrative as such are dependent on this picture theory of knowledge and a picture theory of representation. Most of (...) the epistemological characteristics that White and Ankersmit attribute to historical narratives therefore share the problems of this picture theory.The article's second thesis is that the theories of narrative explanation can also fruitfully be analyzed as inversions of positivist covering-law theory. Ankersmit's brand of narrativism is the most radical in this respect because it posits an opposition between narrative and causal modes of comprehension while simultaneously eliminating causality from narrativist historical understanding. White's brand of narrativism is more of a hybrid than is Ankersmit's as far as its theory of explanation is concerned; nevertheless, it can also be fruitfully interpreted as an inversion of covering-law theory, replacing it by an indefinite multitude of explanatory strategies.Most of the striking characteristics of both White's and Ankersmit's narrativism presuppose positivism in these two senses, especially their claim that historical narratives have a metaphorical structure and therefore no truth-value. These claims are hard to reconcile with the factual characteristics of debates by historians; this problem can be tracked down to the absence in "metaphorical" narrativism of a conceptual connection between historical narratives and historical research. (shrink)

This paper identifies the difficulties in confronting novel history from both a rigorous scientific and artistic literary perspectives and suggests a practical reconciliation—in the form of a discussion and metaphorical opening space—between the two apparent poles of historical understanding and their accompanying genres, types, and tropes.

The purpose of the thesis is to consider travel relations with regard to their onto-phenomenological and semantic of possibility and to raise the question of a possible ethics of travel. In turning the notion of travel back upon its signifying conditions, a connection is established with the notion of metaphor. The metaphysical polarity between proper and metaphorical meaning is furthered onto a problematic of the couple Oikos (house, home in Greek and generally everything that constitutes a sense of the-at-home) and (...) travel with the purpose of complicating their mutual determination and to deconstructively challenge the derivational and recuperative logic that permeates their intra-metaphysical designation. The reconsideration of the conceptual presuppositions of “travel” is carried out through the critique of what is called its hermeneutic premise, formulated here largely drawing on Paul Ricoeur. It is maintained that “travel” in its Western European conceputalisation participates in the traditions of the metaphysics if presence and logocentrism and it is on this level that deconstructive thinking takes effect. Questions related to the theme of travel, such as space, time, boundary, itinerary, event, encounter, as well as to travel writing, such as generic delimination, representation, constative reference and performative engagement, testimonial value, and the antinomy of fact and fiction, are addressed and relocated through the preoccupation with their phenomenological and tropological motifs and in particular with their generalised metaphorical and allegorical conditions, as these are designated by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, respectively. The association of the notion of travel with metaphor, and, by extension, that between Oikos and properness, will show that senses of home and away, rather than being pregiven, emerge from a scriptural condition - a structural of difference and deferral- that interrupts their reductive, totalising, monistic formulations as well as dialectical conceptualisations. (shrink)