The model for historical intelligibility, in short, is literary narrative. We
who hear and read stories are good at telling whether a plot makes
sense, hangs together, or whether the story remains unfinished. If the
same models of what makes sense and what counts as a story
characterize both literary and historical narratives, then distinguishing
between them need not seem an urgent theoretical matter. Similarly,
theorists have come to insist on the importance in non-literary texts –
whether Freud’s accounts of his psychoanalytic cases or works of
philosophical argument – of rhetorical devices such as metaphor, which
have been thought crucial to literature but have often been considered
purely ornamental in other sorts of discourses. In showing how
rhetorical figures shape thought in other discourses as well, theorists
demonstrate a powerful literariness at work in supposedly non-literary
texts, thus complicating the distinction between the literary and the
non-literary.