The relation between historical representation and experience: a critical study of the narrativist tradition

Abstract

This research-proposal focuses on the relation between representation and experience in the work of three central authors of the "narrativist" tradition: Hayden White, Louis Mink, and Frank Ankersmit. Although these authors's propositions are, correctly, widely known for their clarifications on the role of language in historical representation, e although explicit interest on experience is a recend trend in the field of philosophy of history, it has been unsifficiently noted the fact the Mink's and White's work point to the thesis that the narrative expresses at least two unseparable elements of any human experience of the world: emotions and temporality. Ankersmit, a generation younger, and in this case explictly, also tries to articulate the "narrative logic" of his early texts with the "historical experience" of the later ones. This new understanding of the narrativist tradition will be achieved through a painstaking mapping of two of its usually neglected aspects: in first place, of different uses of polysemous concepts, and, in second, of variations in emphasis between ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology. Building on, and in dialogue with, this work of intellectual history, we will advance the theoretical hypothesis according to which is necessary to effect two logically required, but in practice unrealized, distinctions, in the authors' propositions: between "mental" and "materialized" representations, and between "weak" and "strong" experiences, i.e., linguistically mediated and unmediated experiences. What these distinctions, mapped or projected, will have exhibited through the work will be said in the conclusion, where will be proposed "the best narrativist argument", which, by its turn, will clearly show its shortcomings and aporias, allowing us to propose solutions from them. (AU)