Narrative History and Theory

While narrative history has been the prevailing mode in historical scholarship, its preeminence has not gone unquestioned. In the 1980s, the role of narrative in historical writing was "the subject of extraordinarily intense debate." The historical backdrop of this debate can be traced to the preceding two decades, when four groups of thinkers became discernible: (1) social-scientifically oriented historians, in particular the Annales group, among them Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, who saw narrative history as nonscientific; (2) analytical philosophers, among them Hayden White and Louis Mink, who "sought to establish the epistemic status of narrativity"; (3) semiologically oriented theorists, among them Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who saw narrative as "one discursive "code' among others"; and (4) hermeneutically oriented philosophers, among them Hans Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, who viewed narrative as the "manifestation in discourse of a specific kind of time-consciousness." In this essay the author discusses the first two of the major challenges to narrative history and talks about the role of theory in educational history. Because the narrative has dominated the works of American educational historians, the author's distinction between narrative and theory is an attempt to encourage educational historians who are narrativists to open themselves to theoretical works. She argues that there exists a canon of narrativity that should be challenged. In other words, there should be a prominent seat at the educational history table for such scholarship that marries theory with narrative and/or foregrounds theory in examining historical issues in education. (Contains 19 footnotes.)