A Whitean Reading of Richard Stallman: Literary Dimensions in “The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement”

Using Hayden White's premise on historical writing and narrative prose discourse as a basis for discussion, the present paper analyzes how Richard Stallman (1999) employs literary forms in his text “The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement” to present a picture of himself and his contributions to the free software movement in a way that is accessible to a wide audience. By doing so, the paper also attempts to draw attention to the fact that reading histories in a manner that is fully attentive and responsive to the poetics of historical representation enables us to gain insights by comprehending how plot shapes content.

So, approaching Stallman’s writing through a Whitenean stance and declaring Stallman as a practitioner of the romance genre, it is my hope that this reading will be able to serve as a suggestion for further analysis of Stallman’s ideology as an extension and alteration of the concept of “frontier man” in American Romanticism.