ABSTRACT
One difficulty with employing alternative literary approaches in history writing can be seen to lie in the similarities and overlap between interpretation and narration. In calling for the adoption of "new" and unconventional methods by historians, Hayden White has often emphasized the resemblance and occasional conflation of these two means of organizing knowledge. To define the interpretive move or moment in history writing specifically as a "fictionalization" or "figuration" in the sense of shifting things to the metaphorical is, however, rooted in an underlying analogy between historical narratives and literary writing. This chapter explains the phenomenological yearning that White's theorizing admits to historical narrativization comes about, in large part, as a result of this same comparison between history writing and literary prose. Despite White's long-standing emphasis on "the content of the form", it seems to me that he might accept a similar distinction between inward-directed and outward-directed forms of discourse.
