Hayden White for absolute beginners 1. This, however, does not yet constitute history. The formist mode of argument sees individual historical units or entities as self-contained and relatively autonomous. The mechanistic mode looks for laws of cause and effect connecting historical phenomena. The contextualist mode relates units to each other against a common background or frame of reference.
Romance celebrates the triumph of the good after trials and tribulations.
Comedy is socially integrative and celebrates the conservation of shared human values against the threat of disruption. Tragedy stresses the irreconcilable element of human affairs, and laments the loss of the good necessarily entailed when values collide. Rather, historians are 'indentured to a choice' among these options, and cannot not choose. The ironic mind is sceptical about whether making connections is possible at all. But he would nonetheless claim that appeal to the facts is not sufficient to validate or invalidate the large-scale imaginative constructions we call histories.