Soundings in Critical Theory
Dominick LaCapra
“LaCapra is unequalled in his ability to bring theoretical concerns that are associated with literary theory to the attention of historians. He is responsible for enlivening the discipline of history and compelling historians to rethink their foundational assumptions, which normally go unquestioned.”.–Mark Poster. Department of History, University of California, Irvine
“Soundings in Critical Theory continues LaCapra’s work toward making connections between intellectual history, criticism, theory of history and historiography, or rather, in showing that these dimensions ol critical thinking cannot legitimately be kept separate. LaCapra has become an important voice in contemporary critical work in the human sciences, and in this volume he continues to articulate issues and problems In a way that forces people in a variety of disciplines to examine their assumptions and rethink their strategies.” –Michael Roth, Department of History, Scripps College, The Claremont Graduate School
In Soundings in Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his attempt to fashion a historiography that is at once critical and self-critical-a project he initiated in Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts. Language: (1983) and History and Criticism (1985), both available from Cornell University Press. This new collection of essays offers a provocative assessment of the nature of historical understanding and the role of critical theory in historical understanding: of the practice of historical writing as a dialogic exchange both with the past and among professional historians and critics; and of the problem of how to read texts and documents in relation to processes of contextual understanding. A central concern of the volume is the interaction between Marxism, psychoanalysis, and postmodernism, and all of the essays demonstrate the complex ways in which this trio of critical theories continues to affect how historians frame their task. LaCapra first provides a general appraisal of the problems and possibilities of criticism as a genre that questions its own limits, and examines the roles of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Mikhail Bakhtin in the development of contemporary criticism. Subsequent chapters address such issues as the implications of psychoanalysis lor the writing of history, the debate between Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier concerning the status of the symbolic dimension in history, the different conceptions of Romanticism and time in the writings of M. H. Abrams and Paul de Man, the accounts of culture and ideology provided by Karl Marx and Clifford Geertz, and the problem of how best to read and make use of Marx’s work. LaCapra concludes by exploring the larger project of forging viable links between history and critical theory and by evaluating the contributions of deconstruction and the new historicism to this project. Throughout Soundings in Critical Theory, LaCapra clarifies and develops his own understanding of historical criticism as an informed exchange with the past that has implications for 1he present and future, Contemporary cultural and intellectual historians, literary theorists and critics, philosophers, and social scientists will welcome this book.
Dominick LaCapra in Goldwin Smith Professor of European Intellectual History
at Comel University.
