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 or 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.