Soundings in Critical Theory

By Dominick LaCapra

In Soundings in Critical Theory , Dominick LaCapra continues his attempt to fashion a historiography that is at once critical and self-critical. This 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-Francois Lyotard, and Mikhail Bakhtin in the development of contemporary criticism. Subsequent chapters address such issues as the implications of psychoanalysis for the writing of history, the debate between Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier concerning the status of the symbolic dimension in history, 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801495725
• ISBN13: 9780801495724
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 213 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Mature and sensitive perspective on text and context

Dominick LaCapra presents in this volume several essays of great importance to literary criticism and historiography. It is superior to History and Criticism inasmuch as we see in LaCapra a willingness, even an eagerness, to engage the authors he criticizes. Where his critique in H & C verged on arrogance, a kind of rock-throwing, he takes a more measured and reflective tone in this collection. The concepts of transference and dialogue are explained with great precision and impressive self-reflection in the first chapter. Elsewhere he comments on the role of Marxism, and upon the limitations of Paul de Man's formalist deconstruction. Of interest for some readers is LaCapra's early response to the release of de Man's wartime journalism, a subject explored at greater length in his Holocaust study. While LaCapra's theoretical insights are consistently adept throughout his career, this book is better-produced and better-organized. In H & C he contradicts his arguments both in the introduction and the footnotes. One is never sure what to make of his Orphic posturing (is that the point?) In Soundings he achieves something closer to a form suited to his content, asking questions of his own method in a spare and detailed manner and succeeding in shedding tremendous light on problems of critical subject-position today.