Book Review

Methods/Theory

This collection of four essays by Dominick LaCapra is deceptively slim, for it may in fact be several books in one. On one level, LaCapra's book is a state-of-the-field analysis of both history and literary studies, and French studies in particular. Believing that the long wave of theoretical activity in these fields has finally crested, LaCapra endeavors to reevaluate disciplinary boundaries with the aim of fostering greater communication between history and literary studies—between the "history" and "reading" of the book's title.	1
On another level, history and reading refer not to academic disciplines but to the act of reading historical texts. In his first essay, a version of which was previously published in the AHR, LaCapra offers an interesting taxonomy of historical methodologies. He details five basic approaches to historical texts ranging from an ostensibly objective approach that is unconcerned with the problematic of reading itself (dubbed the "seemingly self-sufficient research paradigm") to a deconstructionist approach that, conversely, focuses on the act of reading to the point that historical context can verge on irrelevance. Between these two extremes are three other historical methodologies that, to a greater or lesser degree, grapple with the complex relationship between the reading subject and the historical text as object. One of these methodologies, the one that LaCapra clearly advocates and that he has explored in his earlier writing, is what he terms the "dialogic" approach.	2
As the name would suggest, LaCapra's dialogic method owes an important debt to Mikhail Bakhtin. But it seems equally indebted to Sigmund Freud, and although LaCapra does not draw the comparison explicitly, he clearly sees in Bakhtin and Freud a variety of shared concerns. Both recognized the fundamental importance of the past (whether the historical past of society or the past of the individual analysand) for insight into the present; both advocated a form of "dialogic exchange" with the past—a constant series of questions and exploration of various possibilities—as a means of guarding against a unidirectional imposition or "projection" of the analyst's concerns onto the object of analysis; and both recognized that the past was a complex place where hidden meanings and meaningful silences abounded, making analysis an ongoing process rather than an end to be achieved.	3
LaCapra is particularly interested in the subject of trauma, and much of his recent work—and his study of the Holocaust in particular—has focused on the ways in which trauma resists conventional narration, whether by the historical actors who create texts or by the historians who read them. And it is with respect to trauma that LaCapra sees the dialogic method as particularly important, because in addition to reading texts for what they intend to say (the province of traditional historiography), and for what they reveal without saying explicitly (the focus of practitioners of close textual analysis who search for unexamined preconceptions beneath authorial intent), the dialogic method probes texts for what they cannot say—the traumas that resist articulation and even consciousness. LaCapra argues for an historiography that "would allow trauma to register in the (perhaps never fully successful) attempt to work it through" (p. 62).	. . .