Hayden White on the Vocation of the Humanities

Hayden White is a historian and literary theorist. He is professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught for many years in the History of Consciousness program, and he is currently a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. His many books include Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978), and Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (1999).