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I have no synoptic formula for resolving the various problems I have tried to raise. I would simply end by saying that what emerges from my discussio… - Dominick LaCapra
" "I have no synoptic formula for resolving the various problems I have tried to raise. I would simply end by saying that what emerges from my discussion is the necessity and the difficulty of linking the history of criticism to criticism itself—criticism that is not only literary but sociocultural and political as well. Another way to state this point is to reiterate the need to come to terms with the problem of transference in the relation between past and present. In this respect, the practice of the critic would have to engage the issue of its own situation in the complex intellectual and institutional network formed by elite, official, popular, and “mass” (or commodified) culture. Countering the temptation to replicate in one’s own protocols of interpretation some of the most questionable features of cultural history is for the critic writing the history of criticism—or indeed any form of history—an endeavor that is substantive and self-reflexive at the same time.
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About Dominick LaCapra
Dominick LaCapra (born 1939) is an American-born historian of European intellectual history, best known for his work in intellectual history and trauma studies. He served as the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University, where he is now a professor emeritus.
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Additional quotes by Dominick LaCapra
Rhetoric involves a dialogical understanding of discourse and of “truth” itself in contrast to a monological idea of a unified authorial voice providing an ideally exhaustive and definitive (total) account of a fully mastered object of knowledge. Historiography is dialogical in that, through it, the historian enters into a “conversational” exchange with the past and with other inquirers seeking an understanding of it. The problem is the nature of the conversation.
Rhetoric raises the issues of ambivalence and role tension in language use and their relation to the interaction of discursive modes. With respect to historiography, one obvious problem is the relation between a sympathetic rendering of the past, requiring a measure of identification, and critical distance from it in the interest of both scientific objectivity and critical judgment. A parallel problem is the role of the rhetorical in making all history a living memory that may (as Michelet desired) resurrect the dead and disclose their significance for the present and future. These problems indicate that historiography is itself a tensely mixed mode of language use involving both documentary or “scientific” knowledge and rhetoric in a broader and unavoidably problematic notion of cognition.
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