ABSTRACT
The defining idea of postmodernism was the “crisis of narratives” – a widespread loss of confidence in Enlightenment ideas of rational progress in political and intellectual life. Deconstruction, semiotics, rhetoric, and narrative theory combined as postmodernism’s linguistic turn to undermine the stability of all forms of knowledge that depended on long-form prose compositions. Historical knowledge, especially that created by professional historians, seemed an inevitable target of postmodernist challenges. Confronted with postmodernism’s massive cultural influence during the 1980s and 1990s, historians responded with critical debates over the linguistic turn, especially the role and impact of narrative form and emplotment on historical writing with the work of Hayden White as a central contentious focus. The threat to the validity of modern professional history seemed existential to many historians while others recognized and welcomed the use of literary-critical instruments to analyze the language of historians and their modes of persuasion. As the “culture war” stage of postmodernism subsided, it is interesting to notice how deeply and permanently the linguistic turn has been absorbed into the mainstream of academic history. Far from a destabilizing threat, narrative theory and rhetorical analysis have entered the armature of textual interpretation across research fields from antiquity to the modern era. Post-postmodern history has quietly assimilated useful tools from the postmodern “crisis.”
