ENGL 200 Lecture Notes - The Breakthrough, Uncanny Valley, Sexual Repression
Document Summary
The breakthrough essay by hayden talks about how the greatest historical works that have been written are fiction. You don"t get meaning from facts, you bring meaning to facts. Imbue the meaning into the written form of history. History is a series of events/facts free from language and language seeks to put it into an understandable form for mental consumption. To that end, the written form of a fact effects how it is interpreted, thus making it fiction, in a loose regard. Metahistory: going beyond the facts to communicate something that makes sense. It is not just the form of history that is invented; even the content is partially invented. Meaning changes with the shape that you give. Emplotment: when historical/accurate facts become part of the plot. Ultimately, the history inevitable falls under the plot structures that exist; they are generic and shared by audiences and historians due to the participation depending on the culture.