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History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies. By Dominick LaCapra. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. 235 pages.
History and Reading is made of a series of essays, a genre for academic writing that Dominick LaCapra first adopted in Rethinking Intellectual History (1983) and that he has consistently employed since then. Commenting explicitly upon this way of presenting one's research, LaCapra argues that the essay form is well-suited for "any newer undertaking" (196), such as the cross-disciplinary analyses that are offered in History and Reading. Similarly, he views the "collection of essays" format as befitting projects like his own, which seek to avoid "premature codification or totalizing myths and methodologies," especially "conventional, harmonizing, pleasure-bearing, closure-seeking narrative" (196). This does not mean that LaCapra endorses the all too common practice of periodically gathering one's writings and (re)publishing them in book form, with no regard for thematic unity. The four essays that comprise History and Reading address the same issues if not exactly the same topics, and three of them appear here in print for the first time.
History and Reading concerns itself mostly with the relations between history and the interpretive procedures that literary theory has developed over the past forty years. Asking whether historians "read" and how, LaCapra identifies five ways of dealing with texts that might be used when studying historical discourse: the "repressive approach," which denies that reading is a problem and treats all texts as "evidence" enabling the "determination of certain findings" (30); "synoptic reading," which surveys "large runs of texts or documents" in order to summarize their "contents or themes" (34); "deconstructive reading," which points to the moments when texts reach a "terminal impasse" (41), "undercut" the binary oppositions in which they are grounded (42), or more generally do not conform to their authors' "intentions" (43); "redemptive reading," which-- unlike deconstruction-assumes that the full meaning of a text is always "available" (53), provided that we reconstruct the "context" in which that text was written and the "experience" for which it accounts (60); and "dialogic reading," which views texts and prior investigations into them not just as the objects of further studies, but as entities with which there can (and must) be an "exchange" (65). According to LaCapra, historians have not taken...