Emplotment is Hayden White's term for the way a historian organizes events into a particular kind of story — such as tragedy or comedy — which shapes the meaning the account conveys.

Does narrative make history the same as fiction?

Narrativists hold that history and fiction share narrative form, but most maintain that history remains bound by evidence and the obligation to be true to the documented past.

Narrative and Emplotment

The theory of how historians give meaning to the past by shaping events into narratives, and the debate over whether narrative form is found in the past or imposed by the historian.

Definition

Emplotment is the process by which a historian configures a sequence of events into a meaningful story of a recognizable kind, and narrativism is the view that this narrative form is central to how history conveys understanding.

Scope

This topic covers narrativist theories of history: White's account of emplotment and the rhetorical structures of historical writing, Ricoeur's argument that narrative is the form in which we grasp time, and Mink's analysis of narrative as a mode of comprehension. It examines whether stories are discovered in or projected onto the historical record.

Core questions

How does casting events as a story confer meaning on them?
Are narrative structures inherent in past events or imposed by the historian?
What distinguishes historical narrative from fictional narrative?
How does narrative serve as a distinctive mode of human understanding?

Key theories

Modes of emplotment: White held that historians shape the same events into different meanings by emplotting them as romance, tragedy, comedy, or satire, so interpretation is partly a literary act.
Narrative as comprehension of time: Ricoeur argued that narrative is the means by which human beings make temporal experience intelligible, giving history and fiction a shared rootedness in the configuration of time.

History

Reflection on historical narrative intensified with the linguistic turn. Mink and White in the late 1960s and 1970s argued that narrative form actively shapes historical meaning, while Ricoeur's three-volume study grounded narrative in the philosophy of time, framing decades of debate over the status of historical storytelling.

Debates

Found or made narratives: Theorists dispute whether narratives correspond to story-like structures in the past itself or whether coherence and plot are imposed by the historian, with implications for the truth-value of historical accounts.

Key figures

Hayden White
Paul Ricoeur
Louis Mink
Frank Ankersmit

Seminal works

white1973
ricoeur1984
mink1970

Frequently asked questions

What is emplotment?: Emplotment is Hayden White's term for the way a historian organizes events into a particular kind of story — such as tragedy or comedy — which shapes the meaning the account conveys.
Does narrative make history the same as fiction?: Narrativists hold that history and fiction share narrative form, but most maintain that history remains bound by evidence and the obligation to be true to the documented past.