methodology

In this article, I propose a new interpretation of Hayden White's Metahistory. Instead of treating it as a classical text on historical narrativity, I argue that Metahistory should be read as an inquiry into ‘metahistorical prefigurations', that is, into the moral and ontological presuppositions underlying historical writing.

This article is an attempt to represent Hayden White's writing and teaching career in terms of Giambattista Vico's poetic logic and theory of the development of human consciousness, which passes through four distinct stages, proceeding from one to the next by way of turns (tropic transitions). Each stage corresponds to a trope, a kind of shifter: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony. According to this pattern, culural life begins with metaphor and ends with irony, with a final return (ricorso) to metaphor.

The paper aims to give an outline of what the author considers to be the most influential tendencies in contemporary historiography, perspectivism being one of them. The text is divided into a theoretical and a practical part, where an example of a perspectivistic approach is given, commenting a recent work of Irmina Wawryczek of the Marie Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. To begin with, perspectivism has become one of the leading approaches in today's humanities, having roots already some centuries ago.