Contemporary sociocultural history was in part motivated by a justifiable revolt against an abstracted history of ideas. But it has often tended simp… - Dominick LaCapra

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 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.

Contexts of interpretation are at least three-fold; those of writing, reception, and critical reading.