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COPYRIGHT 2000 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. By Hayden White. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xii + 205 pages.
Figural Realism collects essays written by Hayden White between 1988 and 1997, that is, after the publication of The Content of Form in 1987. The oxymoronic title points to two of White's most basic theses: namely, that figurative language refers to reality "as faithfully and much more effectively than any putatively literalist idiom or mode of discourse might do" (vii); and, conversely, that seemingly "realistic" modes of representation like historiography include elements of "literariness" (ix), as they are grounded in the "four general types of trope" comprised of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (11). Let us recall that White's "tropes" differ from the "figures" of traditional rhetoric insofar as they do not pertain to the linguistic surface of texts. When Marcel Proust, in a passage that White comments on at length in chapter 7 of Figural Realism, describes the drops of water that become suspended at the top of a fountain in the Guermantes's garden as a "nuage humide" (literally: a wet cloud) (129), he connects two different realms through a metaphor in the "traditional" sense, substituting one phrase for another according to a technique he himself explains (and celebrates)...
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