Apology and Rhetoric

A friend was working a few months ago on a study of 'the apologetic tradition' in French literature of the 16th and 17th centuries. When I was reading Envisioning Real Utopias last week, I was reminded of that work, and the idea of apology as a literary form. Although we don't use the term any more (except perhaps in the case of Christian apologetics), I think a lot of non-fiction writing, perhaps of any time, shares the salient features of apology.

One of those features is the assumption of an argument or conversation. Significant energy, or even the main part of the work, will be devoted to (implicitly or explicitly) countering the arguments - or potential arguments - of others. That seems to be what academic writing mainly does.

The second, and I think related feature is detachment from the objects of the argument itself. In Early Modern apologia, writers usually took pseudonyms; they might even then write an apology for themselves (or their own work) from the perspective of this ostensible third party. Similarly contemporary non-fiction often has a quality of writing on behalf of a position, rather than from a position. In an extreme but quite common form, this is done by directing the writer's thought through the interpretation of other writings (or even events).

Such a masking technique displaces the conversation into a third, maybe neutral, space. It creates a recursive style of argument where the protagonists are indistinct hybrids: both the subject of interpretation and the interpretor. Is it in this kind of literary defence-mechanism that we should look for the origins of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical 'objectivity'?