ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the making of literature and the seeing of theory in the common space of culture. This making and seeing has a textual and contextual component, a literary and historical aspect. Dominick LaCapra sees that an important problem is to avoid reducing literature when relating it to history, but it is best, rather, to embrace "mutual interrogation, pressure, and provocation". For LaCapra, literature can resist "contextual forces and historical constraints," actively disorienting or attempting "to transcend contexts," sometimes, as in Derrida, Flaubert and Samuel Beckett, a decontextualization that frustrates direction or goal. LaCapra thinks that voice, structure, perspective and subject position are parts of the history of language that allow for an exploration of the relation between history and literature that is not reductive. In discussing the postsecular, LaCapra wishes to inquire into the role of sacralising and sacred forces in history, literature, literary theory and philosophy.
