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

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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 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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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.

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Rhetoric engages the dialectic of recognition among speakers, of which certain forms of persuasion are only the monological variants. It also fosters the awareness that a dialogical relation to the past encounters the problem of coming to terms with “transference” in the psychoanalytic sense of a repetition/displacement of the “object” of study in one’s own discourse about it—a problem that is circumvented or repressed both in the idea of full empathetic communion with the past and in the idea of a totally objective representation of it.

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