For Foucault the true voices of unreason in the modern period went underground in art and literature, and they lacked a sustaining sociocultural back… - Dominick LaCapra

If the novel is read at all in history, it is typically because it may be employed as a source telling us something factual about the past. Its value is in its referential functions—the way it serves as a window on life or developments in the past. The historian’s focus is, accordingly, on the content of the novel—its representation of social life, its characters, its themes, and so forth. In a word, the novel is pertinent to historical research to the extent that it may be converted into useful knowledge or information.

Historiography today is not in that state of fermentation to be found in fields such as literary criticism and Continental philosophy. Historians tend to pride themselves on their immunity to the wormlike doubt and self-reflective scrutiny that have appeared in other areas of inquiry, notably those infiltrated by recent French thought. Far from seeing recent critical initiatives as holding forth the angelic promise of a reformation or even a renaissance in historical studies, many historians have been seized with what might almost be called a counter-reformational zeal in reasserting orthodox procedures. But the contemporary historical profession is not a solid block, and even the most traditional scholars show an openness to at least a few newer movements. If one were to generalize somewhat rashly about prominent trends in the profession, one might list the following: an inclination to rely on a social definition of context as an explanatory matrix; a shift toward an interest in popular culture; a reconceptualization of culture in terms of collective discourses, mentalities, world views, and even “languages”; a redefinition of intellectual history as the study of social meaning as historically constituted; and an archivally based documentary realism that treats artifacts as quarries for facts in the reconstitution of societies and cultures of the past.

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.