[In the following review of Tropics of Discourse, Champagne commends White's insights into history's roots in storytelling.]

Addressed to the problem of whether historical writing can remain concerned with the past and with an objective view of facts, this collection of essays [Tropics of Discourse] presents history as a narrated story, a literary document with its origins in the human imagination. The title is based upon the etymology of “tropics” and “discourse” and is intent upon suggesting the “ways or manner” of “moving to and fro.” The methodology beyond the title assumes a prelogical area of experience, forgotten by the present-day scientific posture of history and revived in order to establish the tropological basis of history. A basic thesis is the acceptance of Kenneth Burke's proposition that there have been four “master tropes” governing civilized discourse since the Renaissance: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. This fourfold pattern is then discussed in various transformations from Piaget's child studies, through Freud's revelations about dreams, into E. P. Thompson's insights into the working-class consciousness.

Most of these essays have been independently published elsewhere. However, the introduction does tie them together with a perspective not always immediately obvious in such presentations as the two pieces on the “noble savage” and two others on Vico as a modern writer. The basic concern unifying the various studies is that, since the arts and sciences are now mutual handmaids, history is no longer an autonomous discipline. “History” must liberate the present moment from the burden given to it by ties to the past and tradition. Instead White's version of history is tasked with educating lessons about the nature of discontinuity and chaos in modern culture.

With his commentaries about Foucault, Derrida and other French writers presently speaking about the dissolution of literature (the “Absurdists”), White is indeed educating us about the innate discontinuity of culture. His position is that, since culture is a human product created by people, the very existence of that culture is dependent upon systems of signs and must perforce be disappointing. Despite this negative tone and a tendency to create his own terms for groups and movements, White gives us herein some valuable insights into the inherent determinism of the history of ideas because of its basis in human discourse. The arguments supporting Burke's four “major tropes” are an especially valuable contribution to the project of a “universal grammar” for all human discourse proposed by Barthes, Lotman, Todorov, Genette and others.