Writing Response
Hayden White’s most cogent assertion relates to his claim that all written descriptions of events or narratives employ figurative language constructed in a prose form. He creates this theory to suggest that the written form of the novelist or the poet is shared with that of the historian. In the retelling of history the historian must make sense of writing which has been designed with its own designated beginning, middle, and end and is enforced with a political point of view or author agenda, a process similar to what a novelist or poet might do. White emphasizes on this theory in the following quote, “Of course, it is a fiction of the historian that the various states of affairs which he constitutes as the beginning, …show more content…
The historian must filter through the multiple voices, brand away the objectivity, take into account the subjectivity and come to an accurate conclusion on how to properly represent the time period not based off of biased readings. Such a concept can be synthesized into the term Rashomon effect, a term coined in the 1950 film Rashomon directed by Akira Kurosawa, which stems from the films plot in which a murder is detailed through multiple witnesses whose tells end up contradicting one another and convoluting the investigation. In 2015 Robert Anderson, a professor of communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, stated that the Rashomon effect was a term undertake in conversations considering the untangling of historical events, to make rational sense of them. Robert Anderson quoted this assertion by stating, “I suspect the Rashomon effect has shown up in many historic intellectual undertakings that deal with the contested interpretation of events or with disagreements and evidence for them, or with subjectivity/objectivity, memory and perception.” Historical events are written by man (or woman) and the condition of their mind, political standings, and ultimate bias towards the situation must be weighed to find the truth of either their interpretation or reasoning behind such an interpretation. The purge
Hayden White’s most cogent assertion relates to his claim that all written descriptions of events or narratives employ figurative language constructed in a prose form. He creates this theory to suggest that the written form of the novelist or the poet is shared with that of the historian. In the retelling of history the historian must make sense of writing which has been designed with its own designated beginning, middle, and end and is enforced with a political point of view or author agenda, a process similar to what a novelist or poet might do. White emphasizes on this theory in the following quote, “Of course, it is a fiction of the historian that the various states of affairs which he constitutes as the beginning, …show more content…
The historian must filter through the multiple voices, brand away the objectivity, take into account the subjectivity and come to an accurate conclusion on how to properly represent the time period not based off of biased readings. Such a concept can be synthesized into the term Rashomon effect, a term coined in the 1950 film Rashomon directed by Akira Kurosawa, which stems from the films plot in which a murder is detailed through multiple witnesses whose tells end up contradicting one another and convoluting the investigation. In 2015 Robert Anderson, a professor of communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, stated that the Rashomon effect was a term undertake in conversations considering the untangling of historical events, to make rational sense of them. Robert Anderson quoted this assertion by stating, “I suspect the Rashomon effect has shown up in many historic intellectual undertakings that deal with the contested interpretation of events or with disagreements and evidence for them, or with subjectivity/objectivity, memory and perception.” Historical events are written by man (or woman) and the condition of their mind, political standings, and ultimate bias towards the situation must be weighed to find the truth of either their interpretation or reasoning behind such an interpretation. The purge