LaCapra offers an intriguing collection of essays to support both his enthusiasm for intellectual history... and his concern about the 'excesses' he finds in techniques and practices of the new social history. Admitting that the essays are...
Although history was once considered a component of the study of literature, the two fields have grown steadily apart since the sixteenth century. Today few literary theorists and critics study history, and even fewer historians follow the work of their colleagues in literature departments; instead, historians continue to interpret the novel as literary critics and theorists did several decades ago. Dominick LaCapra, an intellectual historian well versed in literary theory and methodology, here addresses the complex role of the novel in history and criticism, seeking to establish a few guiding principles for the study of the historicity of literature. LaCapra provides historically informed readings of eight major modern novels: Stendhal's Red and Black, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Eliot's Middle-march, Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Mann's Death in Venice and Doctor Faustus, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and Gaddis's The Recognitions. In each reading, he explores the question of how the text relates to its historical and literary contexts in symptomatic, critical, and possibly transformative ways. Eschewing both a narrow "intratextual" formalism and a reductive "extratextual" historicism, he attempts to motivate the very selection of relevant contexts for reading by drawing attention to the intellectual and sociopolitical import of our exchange with the past. Throughout, LaCapra consciously emulates the discursive strategy of these novels, thereby reinforcing his assertion that historians have much to learn from modes of discourse they have hitherto viewed as mere documentary symptoms of the past. The work of a knowledgeable and discerning scholar, this bold attempt to create a more engaging dialogue between the past and present will be stimulating reading for intellectual historians and literary theorists.
History in Transit comprises Dominick LaCapra's explorations of relationships he believes have been insufficiently theorized: between experience and identity, between history and various theories of subjectivity, between extreme events and their representation, between institutional structures and the kinds of knowledge produced within them. Taken together, these discussions form a dialogical encounter, positing the links among epistemological questions, historicist ones, and issues pertaining to disciplinary and institutional politics. Reacting against the antitheoretical bias of some prominent historians, LaCapra presents an alternative model of historiographical practice—one in which emphases on plurality and hybridity are combined with the concept of historical experience. For LaCapra experience emerges as a category both theoretically determined and anchored in the facticity of the everyday. LaCapra tests the assumptions and implications of the way one approaches the past by looking to psychoanalysis to render more self-aware the relationship between the historian and his or her material. He offers criticisms of assumptions held by practicing historians and theorists, placing the study of history at the center of a larger argument about the role of the contemporary university. Contesting both corporatization and claims that the university is in ruins, LaCapra writes, "It is paradoxical that the demand to make the university conform to an ever-increasing extent to a market or business model seems oblivious to the fact that the American university has probably been the most successful of its type in the world, that students from other countries disproportionately desire to study in it.
Dominick LaCapra's History and Its Limits articulates the relations among intellectual history, cultural history, and critical theory, examining the recent rise of "Practice Theory" and probing the limitations of prevalent forms of humanism. LaCapra focuses on the problem of understanding extreme cases, specifically events and experiences involving violence and victimization. He asks how historians treat and are simultaneously implicated in the traumatic processes they attempt to represent. In addressing these questions, he also investigates violence's impact on various types of writing and establishes a distinctive role for critical theory in the face of an insufficiently discriminating aesthetic of the sublime (often unreflectively amalgamated with the uncanny). In History and Its Limits, LaCapra inquires into the related phenomenon of a turn to the "postsecular," even the messianic or the miraculous, in recent theoretical discussions of extreme events by such prominent figures as Giorgio Agamben, Eric L. Santner, and Slavoj Zizek. In a related vein, he discusses Martin Heidegger's evocative, if not enchanting, understanding of "The Origin of the Work of Art." LaCapra subjects to critical scrutiny the sometimes internally divided way in which violence has been valorized in sacrificial, regenerative, or redemptive terms by a series of important modern intellectuals on both the far right and the far left, including Georges Sorel, the early Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Frantz Fanon, and Ernst Jünger. Violence and victimization are prominent in the relation between the human and the animal. LaCapra questions prevalent anthropocentrism (evident even in theorists of the "posthuman") and the long-standing quest for a decisive criterion separating or dividing the human from the animal. LaCapra regards this attempt to fix the difference as misguided and potentially dangerous because it renders insufficiently problematic the manner in which humans treat other animals and interact with the environment. In raising the issue of desirable transformations in modernity, History and Its Limits examines the legitimacy of normative limits necessary for life in common and explores the disconcerting role of transgressive initiatives beyond limits (including limits blocking the recognition that humans are themselves animals).
Dominick 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, University of California, Irvine
The relations between memory and history have recently become a subject of contention, and the implications of that debate are particularly troubling for aesthetic, ethical, and political issues. Dominick LaCapra focuses on the interactions among history, memory, and ethicopolitical concerns as they emerge in the aftermath of the Shoah. Particularly notable are his analyses of Albert Camus's novella The Fall, Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, and Art Spiegelman's "comic book" Maus. LaCapra also considers the Historians' Debate in the aftermath of German reunification and the role of psychoanalysis in historical understanding and critical theory. In six essays, LaCapra addresses a series of related questions. Are there experiences whose traumatic nature blocks understanding and disrupts memory while producing belated effects that have an impact on attempts to address the past? Do some events present moral and representational issues even for groups or individuals not directly involved in them? Do those more directly involved have special responsibilities to the past and the way it is remembered in the present? Can or should historiography define itself in a purely scholarly and professional way that distances it from public memory and its ethical implications? Does art itself have a special responsibility with respect to traumatic events that remain invested with value and emotion?
An updated edition of a major work in trauma studies. Trauma and its aftermath pose acute problems for historical representation and understanding. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra critically analyzes attempts by theorists and literary critics to come to terms with trauma and with the crucial role post-traumatic testimonies—notably Holocaust testimonies—assume in thought and in writing. These attempts are addressed in a series of six interlocking essays that adapt psychoanalytic concepts to historical analysis, while employing sociocultural and political critique to elucidate trauma and its aftereffects in culture and in people. This updated edition includes a substantive new preface that reconsiders some of the issues raised in the book.
In History, Literature, Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his exploration of the complex relations between history and literature, here considering history as both process and representation. A trio of chapters at the center of the volume concern the ways in which history and literature (particularly the novel) impact and question each other. In one of the chapters LaCapra revisits Gustave Flaubert, pairing him with Joseph Conrad. Other chapters pair J. M. Coetzee and W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Littell's novel, The Kindly Ones, and Saul Friedlander's two-volume, prizewinning history Nazi Germany and the Jews. A recurrent motif of the book is the role of the sacred, its problematic status in sacrifice, its virulent manifestation in social and political violence (notably the Nazi genocide), its role or transformations in literature and art, and its multivalent expressions in "postsecular" hopes, anxieties, and quests. LaCapra concludes the volume with an essay on the place of violence in the thought of Slavoj Zizek. In LaCapra's view Zizek's provocative thought "at times has uncanny echoes of earlier reflections on, or apologies for, political and seemingly regenerative, even sacralized violence.
To what extent do we and can we understand others—other peoples, species, times, and places? What is the role of others within ourselves, epitomized in the notion of unconscious forces? Can we come to terms with our internalized others in ways that foster mutual understanding and counteract the tendency to scapegoat, project, victimize, and indulge in prejudicial and narcissistic impulses? How do various fields or disciplines address or avoid such questions? And have these questions become particularly pressing and not in the least confined to other peoples, times, and places? Making selective and critical use of the thought of such important figures as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Mikhail Bakhtin, in Understanding Others Dominick LaCapra investigates a series of crucial topics from the current state of deconstruction, trauma studies, and the humanities to newer fields such as animal studies and posthumanist scholarship. LaCapra adroitly brings critical historical thought into a provocative engagement with politics and our current political climate. This is LaCapra at his best, critically rethinking major currents and exploring the old and the new in combination, often suggesting what this means in the age of Trump.
Defying comprehension, the tragic history of the Holocaust has been alternately repressed and canonized in postmodern Western culture. Recently our interpretation of the Holocaust has been the center of bitter controversies, from debates over Paul de Man's collaborationist journalism and Martin Heidegger’s Nazi past to attempts by some historians to downplay the Holocaust’s significance. A major voice in current historiographical discussions, Dominick LaCapra brings a new clarity to these issues as he examines the intersections between historical events and the theory through which we struggle to understand them.In a series of essays—three published here for the first time—LaCapra explores the problems faced by historians, critics, and thinkers who attempt to grasp the Holocaust. He considers the role of canon formation and the dynamic of revisionist historiography, as well as critically analyzing responses to the discovery of de Man’s wartime writings. He also discusses Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism, and he sheds light on postmodernist obsessions with such concepts as loss, agora, dispossession, deferred meaning, and the sublime. Throughout, LaCapra demonstrates that psychoanalysis is not merely a psychology of the individual but that its concepts have sociocultural dimensions and can help us perceive the relationship between the present and the past. Many of our efforts to comprehend the Holocaust, he shows, continue to suffer from the traumatizing effects of its events and require a "working through" of that trauma if we are to gain a more profound understanding of the meaning of the Holocaust.
In 1857, following the publication of Madame Bovary, Flaubert was charged with having committed an "outrage to public morality and religion." Dominick LaCapra, an intellectual historian with wide-ranging literary interests, here examines this remarkable trial. LaCapra draws on material from Flaubert’s correspondence, the work of literary critics, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of Flaubert. LaCapra maintains that Madame Bovary is at the intersection of the traditional and the modern novel, simultaneously invoking conventional expectations and subverting them.
Dominick LaCapra calls for a new view of intellectual history--one that will revitalize the importance of reading and interpreting significant texts. In ten essays, he reformulates the problem of the relation between the "great" texts of the Western tradition and their contexts. Seeking to refine "context" into a concept useful to historical research, LaCapra urges intellectual historians to learn from lessons and developments in contemporary literary criticism and philosophy, fields that have undertaken a radical reassessment of the reading of texts.
Perhaps the leading Western intellectual of his time, Jean-Paul Sartre has written highly influential works in an awesomely diverse number of subject areas: philosophy, literature, biography, autobiography, and the theory of history. This concise and lucidly written book discusses Sartre's contributions in all of these fields. Making imaginative use of the insights of some of the most important contemporary French thinkers (notably Jacques Derrida), Dominick LaCapra seeks to bring about an active confrontation between Sartre and his critics in terms that transcend the opposition, so often discussed, between existentialism and structuralism. Referring wherever appropriate to important events in Sartre's life, he illuminates such difficult works as Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason, and places Sartre in relation to the traditions that he has explicitly rejected. Professor LaCapra also offers close and sensitive interpretations of Nausea, of the autobiography, The Words, and of Sartre's biographical studies of Baudelaire, Genet, and Flaubert. "I envision intellectual history," writes LaCapra, "as a critical, informed, and stimulating conversation with the past through the medium of the texts of major thinkers. Who else in our recent past is a more fascinating interlocutor than Sartre?" A Preface to Sartre will be welcomed by philosophers, literary critics, and historians of modern Western culture. It is also an ideal book for the informed reader who seeks an understanding of Sartre's works and the issues they raise.
LaCapra addresses the ongoing concern with the application of theory to contemporary historical research and analysis through a comparison of two authors seldom read together: Alexis de Tocqueville and Michel Foucault.
In this study LaCapra addresses the ongoing concern with the application of theory - namely that of literary studies and linguistics - to contemporary historical research and analysis. The book is an attempt to address the concerns of troubled scholars who resist theoretical discussions.
Dominick LaCapra calls for a new view of intellectual history--one that will revitalize the importance of reading and interpreting significant texts. In ten essays, he reformulates the problem of the relation between the "great" texts of the Western tradition and their contexts. Seeking to refine "context" into a concept useful to historical research, LaCapra urges intellectual historians to learn from lessons and developments in contemporary literary criticism and philosophy, fields that have undertaken a radical reassessment of the reading of texts.
The relations between memory and history have recently become a subject of contention, and the implications of that debate are particularly troubling for aesthetic, ethical, and political issues. Dominick LaCapra focuses on the interactions among history, memory, and ethicopolitical concerns as they emerge in the aftermath of the Shoah. Particularly notable are his analyses of Albert Camus's novella The Fall, Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, and Art Spiegelman's "comic book" Maus. LaCapra also considers the Historians' Debate in the aftermath of German reunification and the role of psychoanalysis in historical understanding and critical theory. In six essays, LaCapra addresses a series of related questions. Are there experiences whose traumatic nature blocks understanding and disrupts memory while producing belated effects that have an impact on attempts to address the past? Do some events present moral and representational issues even for groups or individuals not directly involved in them? Do those more directly involved have special responsibilities to the past and the way it is remembered in the present? Can or should historiography define itself in a purely scholarly and professional way that distances it from public memory and its ethical implications? Does art itself have a special responsibility with respect to traumatic events that remain invested with value and emotion?
Reaffirming the importance of the texts and artifacts of high culture to the historian, LaCapra singles out the novel for special attention. He treats as well such topics as the role of rhetoric in history, the study of popular and mass culture, and the writing of the history of criticism. In addition, he examines the significance of the psychoanalytic concept of "transference" for the dialogue between the historian and the past. Throughout he seeks to enlarge the scope of critical interpretation in ways that touch upon the concerns of all students of culture."--Back cover
Dominick LaCapra's History and Its Limits articulates the relations among intellectual history, cultural history, and critical theory, examining the recent rise of "Practice Theory" and probing the limitations of prevalent forms of humanism. LaCapra focuses on the problem of understanding extreme cases, specifically events and experiences involving violence and victimization. He asks how historians treat and are simultaneously implicated in the traumatic processes they attempt to represent. In addressing these questions, he also investigates violence's impact on various types of writing and establishes a distinctive role for critical theory in the face of an insufficiently discriminating aesthetic of the sublime (often unreflectively amalgamated with the uncanny). In History and Its Limits, LaCapra inquires into the related phenomenon of a turn to the "postsecular," even the messianic or the miraculous, in recent theoretical discussions of extreme events by such prominent figures as Giorgio Agamben, Eric L. Santner, and Slavoj Zizek. In a related vein, he discusses Martin Heidegger's evocative, if not enchanting, understanding of "The Origin of the Work of Art." LaCapra subjects to critical scrutiny the sometimes internally divided way in which violence has been valorized in sacrificial, regenerative, or redemptive terms by a series of important modern intellectuals on both the far right and the far left, including Georges Sorel, the early Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Frantz Fanon, and Ernst Jünger. Violence and victimization are prominent in the relation between the human and the animal. LaCapra questions prevalent anthropocentrism (evident even in theorists of the "posthuman") and the long-standing quest for a decisive criterion separating or dividing the human from the animal. LaCapra regards this attempt to fix the difference as misguided and potentially dangerous because it renders insufficiently problematic the manner in which humans treat other animals and interact with the environment. In raising the issue of desirable transformations in modernity, History and Its Limits examines the legitimacy of normative limits necessary for life in common and explores the disconcerting role of transgressive initiatives beyond limits (including limits blocking the recognition that humans are themselves animals).
Defying comprehension, the tragic history of the Holocaust has been alternately repressed and canonized in postmodern Western culture. Recently our interpretation of the Holocaust has been the center of bitter controversies, from debates over Paul de Man's collaborationist journalism and Martin Heidegger’s Nazi past to attempts by some historians to downplay the Holocaust’s significance. A major voice in current historiographical discussions, Dominick LaCapra brings a new clarity to these issues as he examines the intersections between historical events and the theory through which we struggle to understand them.In a series of essays—three published here for the first time—LaCapra explores the problems faced by historians, critics, and thinkers who attempt to grasp the Holocaust. He considers the role of canon formation and the dynamic of revisionist historiography, as well as critically analyzing responses to the discovery of de Man’s wartime writings. He also discusses Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism, and he sheds light on postmodernist obsessions with such concepts as loss, agora, dispossession, deferred meaning, and the sublime. Throughout, LaCapra demonstrates that psychoanalysis is not merely a psychology of the individual but that its concepts have sociocultural dimensions and can help us perceive the relationship between the present and the past. Many of our efforts to comprehend the Holocaust, he shows, continue to suffer from the traumatizing effects of its events and require a "working through" of that trauma if we are to gain a more profound understanding of the meaning of the Holocaust.
Dominick 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, University of California, Irvine
In History, Literature, Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his exploration of the complex relations between history and literature, here considering history as both process and representation. A trio of chapters at the center of the volume concern the ways in which history and literature (particularly the novel) impact and question each other. In one of the chapters LaCapra revisits Gustave Flaubert, pairing him with Joseph Conrad. Other chapters pair J. M. Coetzee and W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Littell's novel, The Kindly Ones, and Saul Friedlander's two-volume, prizewinning history Nazi Germany and the Jews. A recurrent motif of the book is the role of the sacred, its problematic status in sacrifice, its virulent manifestation in social and political violence (notably the Nazi genocide), its role or transformations in literature and art, and its multivalent expressions in "postsecular" hopes, anxieties, and quests. LaCapra concludes the volume with an essay on the place of violence in the thought of Slavoj Zizek. In LaCapra's view Zizek's provocative thought "at times has uncanny echoes of earlier reflections on, or apologies for, political and seemingly regenerative, even sacralized violence.
In 1857, following the publication of Madame Bovary, Flaubert was charged with having committed an "outrage to public morality and religion." Dominick LaCapra, an intellectual historian with wide-ranging literary interests, here examines this remarkable trial. LaCapra draws on material from Flaubert’s correspondence, the work of literary critics, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of Flaubert. LaCapra maintains that Madame Bovary is at the intersection of the traditional and the modern novel, simultaneously invoking conventional expectations and subverting them.
Reacting against the antitheoretical bias of some historians, LaCapra presents an alternative model of historigraphical practice - one in which emphases of plurality and hybridity are combined with the concept of historical practice.
Although history was once considered a component of the study of literature, the two fields have grown steadily apart since the sixteenth century. Today few literary theorists and critics study history, and even fewer historians follow the work of their colleagues in literature departments; instead, historians continue to interpret the novel as literary critics and theorists did several decades ago. Dominick LaCapra, an intellectual historian well versed in literary theory and methodology, here addresses the complex role of the novel in history and criticism, seeking to establish a few guiding principles for the study of the historicity of literature. LaCapra provides historically informed readings of eight major modern novels: Stendhal's Red and Black, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Eliot's Middle-march, Flaubert's Sentimental Education, Mann's Death in Venice and Doctor Faustus, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and Gaddis's The Recognitions. In each reading, he explores the question of how the text relates to its historical and literary contexts in symptomatic, critical, and possibly transformative ways. Eschewing both a narrow "intratextual" formalism and a reductive "extratextual" historicism, he attempts to motivate the very selection of relevant contexts for reading by drawing attention to the intellectual and sociopolitical import of our exchange with the past. Throughout, LaCapra consciously emulates the discursive strategy of these novels, thereby reinforcing his assertion that historians have much to learn from modes of discourse they have hitherto viewed as mere documentary symptoms of the past. The work of a knowledgeable and discerning scholar, this bold attempt to create a more engaging dialogue between the past and present will be stimulating reading for intellectual historians and literary theorists.
All author royalties from the sale of this book are awarded to the Goldman Family. In 1994, Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson were brutally murdered at her home in Brentwood, California. O.J. Simpson was tried for the crime in a case that captured the attention of the American people, but he was ultimately acquitted of criminal charges. The victims' families brought a civil case against Simpson, which found him liable for willfully and wrongfully causing the deaths of Ron and Nicole committing battery with malice and oppression. Twelve years later, HarperCollins announced the publication of a book in which O.J. Simpson revealed how he would have committed the murders—under the pretense that his confession was “hypothetical.” In response to public outrage that Simpson stood to profit from these crimes, HarperCollins canceled the book. Just one year later, Federal Court Judge A. Jay Cristol awarded the Goldman family the rights to If I Did It. Thus began one of the strangest odysseys in publishing history. Originally written by O.J. Simpson, the Goldmans published a new edition of the book in the fall of 2007, which included essays written by members of the Goldman family, a member of the Goldman family legal team, and O.J.'s ghostwriter that reveal the fascinating story behind the bankruptcy case, the book's publication, and the looming court proceedings, which would eventually lead to his conviction. The book, called “one of the most chilling things I have ever read” by Barbara Walters, skyrocketed up bestseller lists across the country in the months following publication as the national media relentlessly covered O.J. Simpson's dramatic Las Vegas arrest for armed robbery and kidnapping. The Goldman family views the book as his confession and has worked hard to ensure that the public will read this book and learn the truth. This is O.J. Simpson's original manuscript with up to 14,000 words of additional key commentary from those whose lives were forever changed by the heinous crime.
To what extent do we and can we understand others—other peoples, species, times, and places? What is the role of others within ourselves, epitomized in the notion of unconscious forces? Can we come to terms with our internalized others in ways that foster mutual understanding and counteract the tendency to scapegoat, project, victimize, and indulge in prejudicial and narcissistic impulses? How do various fields or disciplines address or avoid such questions? And have these questions become particularly pressing and not in the least confined to other peoples, times, and places? Making selective and critical use of the thought of such important figures as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, and Mikhail Bakhtin, in Understanding Others Dominick LaCapra investigates a series of crucial topics from the current state of deconstruction, trauma studies, and the humanities to newer fields such as animal studies and posthumanist scholarship. LaCapra adroitly brings critical historical thought into a provocative engagement with politics and our current political climate. This is LaCapra at his best, critically rethinking major currents and exploring the old and the new in combination, often suggesting what this means in the age of Trump.
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