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.