History, Textuality, and Responsibility: A Biographical Q & A - Interview with Dominick LaCapraPRESENTATION
Dominick LaCapra is Professor Emeritus of History and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where he has served as the Bryce and Edith Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies. Professor LaCapra’s work has had significant impact from the 1980s onwards, initially proposing an agenda for the affirmation and critical rethinking of intellectual history within the broader field of historical studies. This was largely animated by an interface the author sought to establish – and legitimize – between history, critical theory, and literary studies. From the 1990s onwards, LaCapra’s texts have come to exert an influence on discussions surrounding the ethical and epistemological issues raised by memory practices related to traumatic events. The exchange of questions and answers that follows is of an introductory and biographical character, so it seemed more appropriate to let the author’s words speak for themselves and restrict this presentation to a minimal extent.
LaCapra summarizes his intellectual and professional trajectory, those he identifies as the main arguments of his work, as well as the most relevant reactions to them. The last question, of a more specific and authorial nature, was formulated based on a text that marked our formation as researchers at PUC-Rio: the book History and Criticism – a book we were pleased to learn Professor LaCapra also holds in high regard. At PUC-Rio, where the three of us obtained our PhDs in History, LaCapra’s work had a Brazilian reception, if we are not mistaken, relatively early on, through professors Ricardo Benzaquen de Araújo and Luiz Costa Lima. Without claiming any privilege over other issues addressed by the author, our question is an expression of a way of relating history and literature cultivated in that space, which we believe owes much to this moment in LaCapra’s trajectory, and which inspired the proposal for this special issue of Varia Historia.
Could you please tell us something you find suitable about your personal life and your education before you began teaching at Cornell?
My father immigrated from Italy at a very early age. My mother was of similar background and a first-generation American. Neither went beyond a primary-school education or became wealthy. But both very much believed in caring and providing emotional support for their children. I had three younger sisters who, unfortunately, are all deceased. I have a daughter, Véronique, a science reporter who works at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and a stepdaughter Molly (McLaughlin), who is an accomplished weaver working on fine textiles (she has a website). I have been with my partner Jane (Pedersen) for over 40 years. (She retired as Associate Dean for Administration and Finance at Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences.) Throughout that time, we have always had dogs, at one point as many as five but usually two. At least one of them has always been a chow chow, a breed (but not a name) that originated in China. We lived in Ithaca for over 40 years but in 2012 moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Jane grew up in southern New Mexico near the border of Mexico and Texas, and moving to Santa Fe was for her a kind of homecoming. In contrast, I was born and spent my early youth in Brooklyn, but in adulthood visited Santa Fe and New Mexico in general quite often. We may soon move again to be closer to our adult children who also are attached to their dogs.
I went to parochial (Roman Catholic) grammar school (Saint Benedict Joseph Labre, with Sisters of Saint Joseph) and high school (Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, with Christian Brothers), both in New York City. For college, I went to Cornell University in part because I had a good friend already there and in part because they offered me sufficient financial aid that relieved my parents of any financial obligation for my college years. Cornell proved to be a good choice. I lived for a couple of years at Telluride House, which is a kind of scholarship “fraternity” or, in the preferred term, living unit. It had free room and board, and more importantly it had excellent students living with a handful of faculty and guests. It was self-governing and also a place where prominent visitors to the university would stay or at least visit, and the scientist Linus Pauling was a friend of the House who visited fairly often.
Cornell had excellent faculty. I majored in both philosophy and government, especially political theory. In my senior year (1960-61), I was a teaching assistant for Walter Berns, who taught both political theory and constitutional law. He had been a student of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago. He urged me to go there to study political theory. But I decided on another course during the year after college when I was fortunate to have a Fulbright fellowship for study in France. I felt that my prior work in philosophy and political theory would be applicable to the study of intellectual history, but the latter gave greater scope for interdisciplinary work, including in literature. One professor of history proved to be especially influential for me: David Brion Davis who at that time taught American intellectual history with a strong interest in the European background of thought in America. (Just about the time I returned to Cornell as an assistant professor, in 1969, Davis was moving to Yale where he went on to do very important work on the history of slavery.) Cornell had an outstanding philosophy department which was a force in introducing analytic philosophy in the USA. I took quite a few courses with John Rawls (later at Harvard), David Sachs (later at Johns Hopkins), and Norman Malcolm (who spent his career at Cornell and was able to get Wittgenstein to visit for a period of time). I also took the graduate seminar of M. H. Abrams on Romanticism and interacted with him both then and later when I returned to Cornell as a faculty member. Abrams helped to stimulate my interest in literature, as did Sachs who was one of the few analytic philosophers who taught aesthetics. At Cornell, the philosophy faculty thought I would go on in that field, and some were surprised when I did not.
In three years in France in the 1960’s (1961-62 and 1965-67), I spent time in Paris, Lyon, and Aix-en-Provence. I especially liked the south where the climate was in certain ways similar to that of Santa Fe, with the sun shining almost every day. (Ithaca is beautiful but often cloudy.) In France I was able to read broadly, take whatever courses I found interesting, and learn French to the point that “natives” often took me to be French. Every morning for a couple of hours, I even read Proust in the Luxembourg gardens. Harvard (M.A. 1963, PhD 1970) was itself beautiful in the English style, and I received a solid professional formation in History. I was fortunate to be able to teach as a “tutor” not only in History but in the Social Studies honors program, which had impressive figures such as Stanley Hoffman and Barrington Moore Jr. Moore, while leftist politically, was a very wealthy “urban patrician.” (He even allowed an undergraduate to write a senior thesis on “who rules America,” using Moore’s own portfolio as a reference point!) One of the surprising moments in my time there was when Moore looked across the seminar table and referred to me as a colleague.
Part of the surprise was that Harvard at the time was very hierarchical, whereas Cornell had at least a democratic style, even though there was a power structure within departments and, in certain respects, throughout the university. Everyone teaching in History at Cornell tended to have similar responsibilities, and no one had a monopoly on an area of study. Votes at meetings counted equally on most issues. By contrast, at that time at Harvard, department meetings were structured so that subordinate groups such as teaching fellows, instructors, and typically untenured assistant professors left a meeting at different points, after which the tenured faculty made the important decisions. They even had a ranking of graduate students with those over a certain cut-off having the opportunity, after completing their degree, to remain and teach at Harvard as instructors. I qualified but did not take the opportunity to become an instructor. I was in fact happy to return to Cornell as an assistant professor in 1969, which was considered by my thesis director (H. Stuart Hughes) to be a very desirable position.
Where did you teach and work as a professor?
As a professor, I wound up spending my entire career at Cornell despite full-professor offers to leave for other schools, including Chicago (History), Pennsylvania (English), and Princeton (Comparative Literature). My work has been quite interdisciplinary, and other departments have typically supported my principal appointment by a given department. Some professors in the United States have appointments in different departments, and many do teach at different schools during the course of their careers, often following the ladder of a commonly acknowledged hierarchy of universities. But I was working well at Cornell and was fortunate to receive a named chair relatively early in my career. At Cornell, I also in time held a joint appointment in Comparative Literature and was a member of the graduate fields of Romance Studies and the program in Jewish Studies. Moreover, I always had a significant group of graduate students whom I did not want to disappoint. (Former students who worked with me may be found as tenured faculty at various schools, including Columbia University, Emory University, Georgetown University, Hebrew University, Marquette University, National University of Singapore, The New School for Social Research [two], Northwestern University, Portland State University, Princeton University, Rice University, Rutgers University, Tsinghua University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Tennessee, University of Texas at Austin [two], University of Texas at Dallas, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Yale-NUS.)
Did you engage in academically related administrative work?
At Cornell, I served for two years as Acting Director and for ten years as Director of the Society for the Humanities. I am senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory of which I was associate director from 1996–2000, and from 2000-2008 its director. The Society for the Humanities at Cornell was founded by the philosopher Max Black and colleagues in various fields, such as M. H. Abrams in literature. It was dedicated to furthering innovative work in various humanistic disciplines and has a significant endowment that allows it to bring to Cornell scholars from different universities around the world as well as to offer fellowships to a number of Cornell faculty. Together these scholars form an interactive group that hold a weekly seminar to discuss papers submitted by attendees and indicative of their frequently interdisciplinary approaches to problems. I took a very active role in the program and often read the work of fellows and wrote letters of recommendation for them. I performed a comparable role in The School of Criticism and Theory. It was founded by a group of internationally well-known scholars, including Murray Krieger, Geoffrey Hartman, Northrop Frye, and Hayden White. Their task was to assemble scholars from around the world to do research and discuss problems that typically are of interest to more than one humanistic discipline.
Would you say something about the many books you have published?
I have published fifteen books and edited or co-edited two editions (The list is below). All of my books have had a good distribution, but four are probably the most widely read and influential: Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (1983), History and Criticism (1987), Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994), and Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001, 2014). The most recent book, Understanding Others: Peoples, Animals, Pasts (2018), is in certain ways a synthesis of ideas developed over time, presenting them in a concise and hopefully lucid manner. It is particularly useful in explicating my selective use of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and dialogism as well as my conception of historiography as involving self-implication, empathy, and responsive understanding with respect to objects of study (including other animals). I have selectively integrated into my work in intellectual history developments in critical theory, such as poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, and attempted to show their relevance for the rethinking of history. I have also attempted to explore the use in historical studies of techniques developed, in good part or even primarily, in literary studies and aesthetics, such as close reading and the role of a critical approach to the interaction between texts or artifacts and their contexts of production and reception. In addition to its role in the field of history, my work has been widely discussed in other humanities and social science disciplines.1My general goal has been to investigate carefully, accurately, comparatively, and critically, thought processes and cultural practices in various related fields. Today the boundary between history and literature is at times not only permeable but all but effaced, notably when literature is seen as symptomatic of other sociohistorical or economic forces (as in important approaches to Marxism or psychoanalysis) or when history is understood as foundationally or predominantly fictive or literary (as in radical constructivism). I do not think history and literature (or the historical and the literary) form discrete realms or a binary opposition. But the relations and interactions between them are complex, differentiated, and variable over time. I have tried to develop an approach that is informed, exploratory, and thought-provoking without being reductionist or prone to sensationalist claims.
In your recent work you refer to the “postsecular.” Could you elaborate on this puzzling concept?
The postsecular dimension of Nazism concerns what Saul Friedländer refers to as redemptive anti-Semitism, the belief that elimination of the Jews is necessary for the redemption or liberation of the Nazis from the supposed contamination of the Volksgemeinschaft and from the bondage they believed was created for them by the mere existence of Jews. In this sense, Endlösung (final solution) was Erlösung (redemption or liberation). This notion was also apocalyptic since the end of the Jews would bring salvation for the Nazis. This type of thinking or ideology could have other applications, especially in the notion of regeneration or redemption through violence, which is crucial in a sacrificial frame of reference. I think it is at play in various forms of victimization, including ethnic “cleansing.” One additional important area in which regeneration through violence and the denigration, often the scapegoating of others has been significant took the form of genocidal treatment of native Americans, notably in the so-called “manifest destiny” of the United States in conquering, settling, oppressing, and killing indigenous people inhabiting the land.
Others have discussed such phenomena in terms of a secular or political religion. I think “postsecular” is better in that it is not clearly religious in terms of traditional religions although there are similarities to aspects of what are often termed religions (for example, the role of sacrifice, self-sacrifice, and missionary zeal in Christianity). And there are more obvious ways in which traditional religions may be connected with postsecular ideologies, for example, in terms of anti-Semitism and other prejudices against groups or peoples. I note that the postsecular is neither secular nor specifically religious but betwixt and between. And certain postsecular formations may be defended as desirable, for example, non-invidious views of the sacredness of others (people or animals) and of land in ways that may block exploitation as well as the belief that rituals of some sort are needed for transitional aspects of life such as birth and death. Some traditional religions also contain these views or beliefs, notably indigenous religions that see all life and some cherished places as sacred.
Secularization is generally understood as a movement from the religious to the secular, but it may have postsecular dimensions when the supposed secular phenomenon is held to be sacred or somehow uplifting or even transcendent, for example, art or nature for many Romantics. Here M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism is of interest, as are other works I discuss in various publications. In this respect, I would suggest the essay “The Temporality of Rhetoric” which is a chapter in Soundings in Critical Theory. In a broader sense, I would also mention “The Return of the Historically Repressed” in Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. But there are other places in my work as well. By the way, trauma itself may be sacralized or rendered sublime. I tend to see the sacred and the sublime as postsecular affiliates, with the sacred often taken as religious (indeed as the crux of religion for Durkheim and his school) and the sublime as secular, although it is rarely taken simply as secular except in disabused attempts to deflate it. I tend to be critical of sacralizations or “sublimations” of trauma because I think they tend to validate or even valorize victimization, including self-victimization. In general I have been engaged in a critique of victimization in its various forms as well as of the idea of regeneration if not redemption through violence.
You also refer to the “transhistorical,” which also seems puzzling.
The transhistorical refers to what recurs or is repeated with variations over time, including the transgenerational transmission of trauma and victimization. The transhistorical need not be universal, and the assertion that it is at least in some cases or forms (the Lacanian “real” or original sin, for example) is contestable. In any empirical sense, it is difficult to argue for universality in the absence of universal knowledge, and I neither claim the latter nor even think it is desirable as a goal of thought. I am explicit (especially in Understanding Others) in indicating that I would at most argue for the transhistorical status of original sin, say, only within certain traditions, such as the ill-defined and problematic Western tradition where it (or some analog of it) appears in various forms over time. In another sense, I would suggest that humans have shown a tendency or even propensity to be transgressive and excessive, which certain cultures recognize and may try to counteract. The Navajo, for example, value balance and “walking in beauty,” and the Hopi along with other indigenous peoples have comparable concepts that are often difficult to translate. In Christianity, there is also an attempt to limit excess and to condemn transgression, although there is also a countertendency to see sin as related to redemption as the great sinner becomes a great saint in accounts that are repeated in endless stories of sinners become saints (Paul and Augustine, for example). I would also note something that may be obscure in my earlier works. I think the return of the repressed (as well as the dissociated) need not imply that the repressed refers only to an earlier time. It may, but it may also refer to what is repressed in the present even if what is not recognized is out in the open but is experienced as “uncanny”, dissonant, or rejected with respect to the image of oneself or one’s people one wants to affirm or idealize. In certain ways, this would apply to the racism and intolerance in Trump and his sometimes worshipful followers that both refer back to unresolved, neoconfederate legacies of the Civil War and point to prevalent processes to which one is often blind in the current nature of the United States, for example, with respect to right-wing extremism, authoritarianism, and intolerance. I am also critical of views of the Nazis or of other groups or forms of violence that see them as reversions to barbarism or to animality and “brutishness.” I think these views are uninformed about past societies and about animals. Typically, not animals but humans who are warped and excessive are brutish. (The current term “tribalism” is also objectionable as referring to cult-like partisanship. Often actual tribes are not “tribal” in this sense.) And such demeaning views often are attempts to maintain an oversimplified idea of modernity as the scene of progress or increasing justice and mercy (vide Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self). But I also think that attempts, such as that of Zygmunt Bauman, to see Nazism as specifically modern are also dubious, and they often come with omission or downplaying of the more “postsecular” dimension of processes, such as a quest for purification and regeneration. Modern technology, along with bureaucracy, the machinery of destruction, the banality of evil, and so forth, may in obvious ways make certain excesses more possible, but it does not adequately account for them. And I try to resist presenting any idea or argument as fully explanatory or as necessary and sufficient as an account of complex phenomena such as the Holocaust or colonialism.
How has your work been seen?
Commentators have often seen two periods in my work having significant relations to each other. Up until about 1990, I focused on “rethinking intellectual history” in its relation to social and cultural history, emphasizing in a relational and critical manner issues I thought were insufficiently prominent in the field, such as close textual analysis and the problem of the interaction of texts (in the broad sense of signifying practices not restricted to pieces of writing) with their contexts of production and reception. While still attentive to such problems, after 1990 my work became increasingly concerned with, and important in the fields of, trauma studies and its import for crucial social, cultural, and ideological processes such as genocides, scapegoating, and violence (notably but not only with respect to the Holocaust and colonialism). I have also tried to be attentive to the role of various artifacts (writing, testimony, and other signifying practices) in responding to both personal and collective traumatic experiences. Moreover, I have inquired into the problems of posthumanism and postsecularism, including relations to other animals and the role of non-theocentric spirituality. The latter two problems are especially prominent in my most recent work, including the 2018 book Understanding Others: Peoples, Animals, Pasts. The Holocaust became a prominent concern after I attended (in 1990) a conference at UCLA organized by the well-known scholar Saul Friedländer. His idea was to bring together scholars prominent in the area of Holocaust history and others (such as Carlo Ginzburg, Hayden White, myself) whose work he found thought-provoking. His aim was to see if different angles of vision could be generated by their interaction. He was, I think, successful, as is indicated by the book he edited in which Ginzburg, White, and I among others have essays, Probing the Limits of Representation. 2
I would note that the journal Rethinking History (Dec. 2004) contains an essay that I was invited by the editors to write (“Tropisms of Intellectual History”). In it I reflect on my work up to that time and indicate what directions I would try to go in future work. My essay is followed by four others responding to my contribution and providing appraisals of my role in the historical profession (by Ernst van Alphen, Carolyn Dean, Allan Megill, and Michael Roth). A Presidential Session at the 2014 meeting of the American Historical Association was devoted to my work. It was moderated by Carolyn Dean and included presentations by Martin Jay, Gabrielle Spiegel, Judith Surkis, and myself. (The presentations, along with those published in Rethinking History, may be found on my site in “Academia.edu”) I would make special mention of two treatments of my work. My early work is discussed in a well-informed, perceptive essay by Edward Baring (now at Princeton), “Intellectual History and Poststructuralism,” published in A Companion to Intellectual History, ed. Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Hoboken, N. J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2020). My work on trauma is treated with concision and insight in Lucy Bond and Stef Craps, in their Trauma: The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2020). Finally, I would note that I received the Clark Award for distinguished teaching at Cornell and am a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Your book History and Criticism was written and published in the 1980s, when European and US historiography both faced an array of challenges coming from developments in other fields, such as French post-structuralism and the linguistic turn, which called for some kind of response from the historical discipline. What your book seems to suggest, however, is that professional historiography’s responses to these challenges were superficial, as the discipline was, in your view, unable to rethink its task in a critical way. Some themes and threads of the first essay, “Rhetoric and History”, recur in subsequent parts in the book: the questioning of the self-evidence of what you call a documentary model and the historian’s lack of self-understanding regarding their practice. In addition to hampering historical research, reducing it to strictly empirical investigation (a dimension that you recognize as fundamental, but not the only one in the historian’s craft), the model also restricts historical discourse to some imperatives related, in turn, to the objectives that the discipline, such as understood in prominent surveys of the field, hold to be essential, such as creating a sense of continuity between past and present, given the need to create the reader’s identification with history through this kind of nexus (and not others). This identification is produced when the historian endows this past with totality, apparent objectivity and absolute unity. While you do lay out, at the end of this first chapter, a kind of alternative theoretical-methodological agenda for historiography, based both on the critique of the state of the field in the 1980s, and in a renewed deployment of rhetoric, it is in the two subsequent essays, namely, the critical readings of Robert Darnton, Carl Schorske and, in particular, Carlo Ginzburg, that the polemic disposition of the book becomes evident, as you select particularly virtuous practitioners of the kind of view of history you object to for detailed scrutiny. There is, in your appraisal of these authors, a criticism of a lack of cognitive responsibility, linked both to the researcher’s treatment of the past, and – and this is what the question concerns – with the vicarious empathetic appeal that they end up imposing on the reader, an effect that seems to appease what the book calls “the anxiety of transference”. Given your call for cognitive responsibility, we ask you to elaborate a little on the potentially troubling ethical issues related to vicarious identification with the past, from the reader’s point of view. Or, put another way, how this vicarious feeling constrains the historical imagination, taking away what is potentially productive in the displacement generated by transference. Finally, we would like to know what audience the admittedly polemical and critical nature of your book was intended for – is the implied reader of History and Criticism a professional historian, or an interested layperson?
Herman Paul, in his review of my most recent book, Understanding Others, makes a comment with which I agree:
One idea that has permeated Dominick LaCapra’s work from the beginning is that historical texts pose questions to their readers. They call assumptions into question, render the familiar strange, and challenge contemporary habits of thought. Historians can therefore not content themselves with “putting texts into context,” as if texts are adequately understood once the influences that worked upon them have been charted. (American Historical Review, Dec. 2020, p. 1812).
Implicit in Paul’s comment is my affirmation of a dialogic relation to the past involving what M. M. Bakhtin calls “responsive understanding”. This affirmation does not exclude contextualization and empirical research in general as crucial elements of the historian’s craft, but views them as components of an approach that is more comprehensive and bound up with the implication of the historian in the process of inquiry. This implication of self and other is what I relate to “transference” in Freud’s term. It implies that the questioner is also involved and in question in the questions he or she poses to the past. Being in question means that one’s account should strive to be cognitively responsible and ethically responsive in a manner that combines empathy or compassion with scrupulous care in not distorting the past to serve one’s or one’s group’s special interests or “conspiracy theories”. Identification should not be conflated with empathy or compassion although a carefully controlled and self-questioning mode of identification may well be one current in a larger force field also involving critique and self-criticism. Unqualified identification readily leads to projection, to speaking in the other’s voice, and to a weakening of a critical ability both (a) to see the limitations of an approach, such as one that claims to be purely objective, and (b) to try to see the limitations of the approach one is taking oneself, although the latter may be more evident in the responses of others to one’s work, including the way it presents the work of others. My approach is not, I think, purely polemical, but it has a polemical dimension. It includes argument, notably with other historians or interpreters concerning how to understand issues and, more generally, how to elaborate an approach to the past that is aware of one’s implication in its struggles and in contemporary debates or processes that often repeat, in a displaced and at times disguised manner, debates in the past. These repetitions and variations include the relation between the secular and the religious, the requirements of a democratic polity in contrast to the prevarications and self-centeredness of authoritarianism, and the possibilities and constraints of a discipline such as history that is not faith-based or a surrogate for religion. I should add that I see much of value in the work of historians such as Darnton, Schorske, and Ginzburg. And I would repeat something I have already said before: a careful, non-dismissive critical analysis should be given and received as a gift that at its best is thought-provoking and an invitation to think further and even rethink what one has already thought. I would also add that the audience which I address is a split or divided one composed of professional historians (or, more generally, those with special expertise in the areas I discuss) and a more general audience of those with an interest in issues I treat and whom I hope may take an interest in the way I treat them.
Would you provide a list of your books for the reader?
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Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher (Cornell University Press, 1972; reissued in 1985 by University of Chicago Press; revised edition in 2001 by The Davies Group)
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A Preface to Sartre (Cornell University Press, 1978);
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Madame Bovary on Trial (Cornell University Press, 1982);
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Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Cornell University Press, 1983);
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History & Criticism (Cornell University Press, 1985);
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History, Politics, and the Novel (Cornell University Press, 1987);
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Soundings in Critical Theory (Cornell University Press, 1989);
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Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Cornell University Press, 1994);
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History and Memory after Auschwitz (Cornell University Press, 1998);
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History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies (University of Toronto Press, 2000);
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Writing History, Writing Trauma (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001; reissued with new preface in 2014);
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History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Cornell University Press, 2004);
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History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Cornell University Press, 2009);
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History, Literature, Critical Theory (Cornell University Press, 2013);
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Understanding Others: Peoples, Animals, Pasts (Cornell University Press, 2018).
Edited books
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(With S. L. Kaplan), Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Cornell University Press, 1982);
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The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance (Cornell University Press, 1991).
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1
See, for example, TOEWS, John. Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience. American Historical Review, v. 92, n. 4, p. 879-907, out 1987; JAY, Martin. Two Cheers for Paraphrase: Confessions of a Synoptic Intellectual Historian. In: Fin-de-Siècle Socialism and Other Essays. New York: Routledge, 1988, p. 47-61; NOVICK, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity” Question and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1988; KRAMER, Lloyd S. Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. In: HUNT, Lynn (ed.). The New Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, p. 97-128; BERKHOFER, Jr., Robert. Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995; SMITH, Bonnie. The Gender of History. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000; DOSSE, François. La marche de idées: Histoire des intellectuels — histoire intellectuelle. Paris: La Découverte, 2003; CLARK, Elizabeth A. History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 (esp. chaps. 6, p. 106-129, and 7, p. 130-155); STONE, Dan. Histories of the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; KOHUT, Thomas. Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past. New York: Routledge, 2020. On related disciplines, see, for example, HUTCHEON, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988; ROTHBERG, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000; EISENSTEIN, Paul. Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject. Albany: State University Press of New York, 2003; HIRSCH, Joshua. Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004; OLIVER, Kelly. Witnessing. Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001; KAPLAN, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005; LUCKHURST, Roger. The Trauma Question. New York: Routledge, 2008; SCHWAB, Gabriele. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010; BOND, Lucy; CRAPS, Stef. Trauma: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 2020; GANTEAU, Jean-Michel. Working-Through. In: DAVIS, Colin; MERETOJA, Hanna (Eds.). The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma. New York: Routledge, 2020 p. 131-40.
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FRIEDLÄNDER, Saul (Ed.). Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. For some pertinent commentaries on my work, see, for example, ROSENBERG, Philip, review of Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher in The New York Times Book Review, 12 jul. 1972; PIERSON, Stanley, review of Rethinking Intellectual History: History, Theory, Language. Comparative Literature, v. 37, n. 4, p. 359-61, autumn 1985; KRAMER, Lloyd S., review of Rethinking Intellectual History: History, Theory, Language. History of European Ideas, v. 7, n. 2, p. 185-88, 1986. DeBOLLA, Peter, Disfiguring History. Diacritics v. 16, n. 4, p. 48-58, winter 1986; TOEWS, John, review of Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. The American Historical Review v. 100, n. 1, p. 128-130, feb. 1995; TOEWS, John. Manifesting, Producing, and Mobilizing Historical Consciousness in the “Postmodern Condition”. History and Theory, v. 48, n. 3, p. 257-275, oct. 2009. The latter article broadly reviews JENKINS, Keith; MORGAN, Sue and MUNSLOW, Alun (Eds.) Manifestos for History. Nova York: Routledge, 2007. See also GILMAN, Sander, review of Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Modern Philology, v. 94, n. 2, p. 276-79, nov. 1996; DINTENFASS, Michael. Truth’s Other: Ethics, the History of the Holocaust, and Historiographical Theory after the Linguistic Turn. History and Theory, v. 39, n. 1, p. 1-20, feb. 2000; SANYAL, Debarati, resenha de Writing History, Writing Trauma. Substance, v. 31, ns. 2 and 3, p. 301-306, 2002; MOYN, Samuel. Empathy in History; Empathizing with Humanity. History & Theory, v. 45, n. 3, p. 397-415, oct. 2006; KLEINBERG, Ethan. Haunting History: Deconstruction and the Spirit of Revision. History and Theory v. 46, n. 4, p. 113-43, dez. 2007; KLEINBERG, Ethan. Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017; KOOPMAN, Emy. Reading the Suffering of Others: The Ethical Possibilities of “Empathic Unsettlement”. The Journal of Literary Theory, v. 4, n. 2, p. 235-51, 2010; GORDON, Peter, review of History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence. Journal of Modern History, v. 83, n. 1, p. 139-141, mar. 2011; MEGILL, Allan. History, Theoreticism, and the Limits of “The Postsecular”. History and Theory v. 52, n. 1, p. 110-129, fev. 2013. (The article broadly reviews History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence.); BARING, Edward, Intellectual History and Poststructuralism. In: WHATMORE, Richard; YOUNG, Brian. A Companion to Intellectual History. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2016, p. 48-60; SANDS, Danielle, review of Understanding Others: Peoples, Animals, Pasts French Studies, v. 74, n. 1, p. 159-60, jan. 2020.
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Responsible editor:
Ely Bergo de Carvalho
