ABSTRACT
It may be a truism, but is nonetheless often true, that we rarely know what we are actually doing until someone else tells us. So it was with a genuine sense of discovery that I found my work cited in Dominick LaCapra’s penetrating essay “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts” as an example of what he calls “synoptic content analysis.”1 This method of reconstructing the past, he contends, adopts a “documentary approach” to texts rather than seeing them as “worklike” with all of the complexity we normally attribute to works of art. More specifically,
Because most intellectual historians tend to be trained like historians in general rather than literary critics, they lean toward a documentary rather than worklike method, avoiding particularly complex literary texts in favor of ones more easily reduced to a paraphrasable core of meaning, those straightforward “ideas” so often the heroes of their narratives. Even if the synoptic intellectual historian wants to go outside ideas or mental structures to the context in which they are situated, problems remain if the texts to be contextualized are simply assumed to contain arguments that are easily paraphrased, messages that are wholly independent of the medium through which they are conveyed. Furthermore, as LaCapra argues elsewhere, the context which is itself adduced to explain these allegedly unproblematic ideas must also “be seen as a text of sorts. Its ‘reading’ and interpretation post problems as difficult as those posed by the most intricate written text.”2 The relationship between text and context ought, therefore, to be conceptualized as another form of intertextuality rather than a relationship between ideas or mind and world.
