SOURCE: “Fiction and History: A Common Core?,” in International Studies in Philosophy, Vol. XXIV, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 47–63

In the following essay, Cebik examines the philosophical basis for conflating historical writing and literary fiction, as suggested by White's theoretical model of historical discourse and typological schema.

In the last decade, a fad has swept across philosophic discussion of narrative discourse. In boldest terms, the fad consists of treating historical and fictional narrative on a par. Each has equal standing before the bar of human knowledge; each has equal if not identical epistemic standing.

The fad has many roots. Deconstruction's casual dismissal of the text releases every set of narrative sentences for subjective interpretation by the reader, making every act of reading one of artistic creation also. Ricoeur attempted to show the “precedence of our narrative understanding in the epistemological order” in his reconstruction of narrative into a metaphysics of...