Rhetoric involves a dialogical understanding of discourse and of “truth” itself in contrast to a monological idea of a unified authorial voice provid… - Dominick LaCapra

Reading in both its literal and metaphoric senses is a crucial constituent of the problem of language, and it is reciprocally related to writing. A mode of reading implies a mode of writing (and vice versa). In this sense, a different mode of reading would imply that the writing of history would also undergo significant variations and that historical works might take different forms.

Rhetoric highlights the problem of how one reads texts. It even raises the question of whether historians are trained to read. I have already noted the tendency of professional historians to see texts as documents in the narrow sense of the word and, by the same token, to ignore the textual dimensions of documents themselves, that is, the manner in which documents “process” or rework material in ways intimately bound up with larger sociocultural and political processes.

Rhetoric exceeds not only documentary or referential but all utilitarian, workaday, and instrumental functions of language. It involves verbal display or performance in a sense larger than that comprised in the standard notion of the “performative.”