Attached is an image that should help.

Best of luck on your GRE and beyond,

-Brian



Source: Vince and Brian's GRE PowerPrep Explanations
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Explanation

“Confounds,” “repudiates,” and “polarizes” do not fit the basic sense of the sentence we’ve come up with. So let’s focus on “recapitulates” and “anticipates.” Does “anticipates” work? This would require literature to anticipate the history of the culture, in a sense predicting it or happening before the events themselves–that’s an interesting hypothesis but not the one suggested by the tense of the passage, where the subject matter are the events that “have shaped” the culture. We’re left with “recapitulates.” Rereading the sentence with this word, we find that the first part of the sentence now indeed reflects the second part in both the connection of literature and history and their causal order.

We could tear up the sentence structure and make it easier to read. Consider that: dramatic literature often takes the important events that have shaped and guided the culture as its subject matter (and as such, it RECAPITULATES history).