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Historiography today is not in that state of fermentation to be found in fields such as literary criticism and Continental philosophy. Historians ten… - Dominick LaCapra
" "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.
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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 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.
The lack of attention to the problem of rhetoric, or the simple dichotomy between science and rhetoric, induces a tendency to perceive rhetoric as “merely” rhetorical and to understand scientific truth in terms of a rather blind rhetoric of anti-rhetoric. This tendency, which defines science as the adversary or antithesis of rhetoric, has often been conjoined with a defense of a “plain style” that attempts or pretends to be entirely transparent to its object. It is not uncommon to observe that the anti-rhetoric of plain style or, more elaborately, of “scientificity” is itself a self-denying quest for a certain rhetoric, a rhetoric unadorned by figures, unmoved by emotion, unclouded by images, and universalistic in its conceptual or mathematical scope.
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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