History, literature and fiction in Mathematics Education: approaching Hayden White's ideas

Abstract

In this essay we present considerations on the elaboration of narrative historiographical discourse, supported by literary and fictional techniques, as interpretation in historical research. It focus on the ideas of Hayden White, who incited, some decades ago, a debate on the nature of historical knowledge, opposing narratives, literary thinking and scientific knowledge, taking history, a verbal artifact, as the product of a particular use of language, producer of a specific knowledge. We introduce the general types of tropos identified by neoclassical rethorical theory on which White stands -- metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony --, that provide a classification of the types of historical discourse and allow one to see the ways in which historical discourse looks like or seems to converge with fictional discourse. White’s main arguments against the criticism towards a supposed excessive relativity of historical knowledge in his theory: the systems of production of meanings shared by historiography, literature and fiction are all extracted from the historical experience of a people, a group, a culture. Finally, we present two pieces of work on the history of mathematical education that made use of literature and of fiction in order to construct narratives that aim at the roduction of knowledge on teacher education and mathematics education in Brazil.