Hayden White's Metahistory(1973)was an important work of historiography, a book that revealed the ways in which any understanding of history is powerfully conditioned(even determined)by the linguistic form it takes. This occurs because historical narratives are structured in terms of the devices of language, tropes or "protocols, " that are anterior to historical consciousness. For White, the historian's methodology is always crucially anticipated by the structures of language in ways that strongly influence the perspective on any history that claims to have been arrived at independently, naturally or dispassionately. The shapes of historical narrative cannot be innocent, but work in the service of power, and that power exists prior to historical consciousness. The ideas of Metahistory have been taken up by works such as Dominick La Capra's Rethinking Intellectual History(1983)and Hans Kellner's Language and Historical Representation(1989)and the value of these ideas to feminism has also been recognized: history has traditionally been written by men and about men. If the representation of history privileges certain kinds of experience and is predicated on a particular language, then is that not a male experience and a male language? Feminist historiography might be said to have two intellectual projects. The first of these is to recover the occluded narratives of women, perspectives that have been ignored, neglected, or suppressed. This aspect of women's history is dedicated to the retrieval of the lost or unarticulated stories of women in specific social and cultural contexts, studies that reveal the contribution of women in areas of social life that were traditionally thought of as the exclusive province of men. In an article called " Placing Women in History, " for example, Gerder Lerner argued that women's " culturally determined and psychologically internalized marginality seems to be what makes their historical experience essentially different from that of men. But men have defined their experience history and left women out. " Beyond this thesis, it has also argued that women conceive of history in a fundamentally different way from men. Clearly history does not exist in some ontological sense but is discursively constituted from a particular position or viewpoint. Is it the case then that women think of history intellectually and experience it materially in ways that are fundamentally different from men, and is such a difference exclusively a function of gender difference? In other words, what part does gender play in the very conception of historical consciousness that society endorses, or, how is gender central to the formation of discursive historical paradigms? In "Resisting America" Adrienne Rich argued that "Feminist history is not history about women only; it look afresh at what men have done and how they have behaved, not only toward women but toward each other and the natural world. But the central perspective and preoccupation is female, and this implies a vast shift in values and priorities. " American women's fiction has its own history of investigating these issues, a history that includes Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin(1850), Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper(1892), Kate Chopin's The Awakening(1899), and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God(1937). Jane Tompkins has argued that the exclusion of Uncle Tom's Cabin from Sacvab Bercoviteh's scholarly study The American Jeremiad " is a striking instance of how totally academic criticism has foreclosed on sentimental fiction; for, because Uncle Tom's Cabin is absent from the canon, it isn't ' there' to be referred to even when it fulfills a man's theory to perfection. Hence its exclusion from critical discussion is perpetuated automatically, and absence begets itself in a self-confirming cycle of neglect. " It is significant that this debate about the canon should focus on a novel about slavery because the concept of women's history in the United States is crucially affected by the issue of race. Afro-American history was originally conceived of as male(Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison)and so the perspectives of black women were doubly occluded. The publishing history of Hurston's novel is itself an important part of this story. Their Eyes Were Watching God was strongly criticized in 1937 for its racial politics, especially by Alain Loche and Richard Right, and it was not therefore widely known until the 1970s when Robert Hemenway's biography of Hurston was published(1977), the novel was reprinted(1978), and Alice Walker produced a Hurston "Reader"(1979). These events have established Hurston's novel as a canonical text, and they coincided with the remarkable burgeoning of black women's fiction that took place in the 1970s in the novels of Morrison, Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Audre Lorde. Janie Crawford's oral narrative of a struggle towards self-fulfillment in a society that is both sexist and racist is told in a black vernacular to a female auditor, Phobie, who learns that " De nigger woman id de mule uh de world, " and who discovers through Janie's example the possibility of a different future for herself and for other black women. Now briefly answer the following questions;

问答题 Why is White's Metahistory an important work of historiography?

问答题 What did White think of the historian's methodology?

问答题 Why, according to White, are the shapes of history not innocent?

问答题 What did feminism think of history?

问答题 What, according to Gerder Lerner, makes women's historical experience essentially different from that of men?

问答题 What intellectual project is feminist historiography supposed to have in addition to the recovering of the occluded narratives of women, perspectives that have been ignored, neglected, or suppressed?

问答题 What does the author think of history?

问答题 What did Adrienne Rich conceive of feminist history?

问答题 Why were the perspectives of black women in America doubly occluded?

问答题 Why do you think Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is now thought of as a canonical text?