History, Literature, Critical Theory
Product details
- ISBN 9780801478659
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 155 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 15 May 2013
- Publisher: Cornell University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 Friedländer'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 Žižek. In LaCapra's view Žižek's provocative thought "at times has uncanny echoes of earlier reflections on, or apologies for, political and seemingly regenerative, even sacralized violence."
Dominick LaCapra is Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor of History and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author or editor of many books, including History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence; History in Transit; and History and Memory after Auschwitz, all from Cornell.
