A totalizing theory silently excludes texts that contradict its category
Evidence
Jameson speaks so often of ‘all third-world texts’, insists so much on a singular form of narrativity for Third World Literature, that not to take him literally is to violate the very terms of his discourse. Yet one knows of so many texts from one’s own part of the world which do not fit the description of ‘national allegory’ that one wonders why Jameson insists so much on the category, ‘all’. Without this category, of course, he cannot produce a theory of Third World Literature. But is it also the case that he means the opposite of what he actually says: not that ‘all third-world texts are to be read … as national allegories’ but that only those texts which give us national allegories can be admitted as authentic texts of Third World Literature, while the rest are by definition excluded? — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 169
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: Pinpoints the circular logic under which a theory of ‘all’ texts functions only by excluding the texts that falsify it — a genuine analytical insight about how totalizing literary categories operate.
- XREF: connects to: Structural interpretation reads the gaps rather than the unified whole — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1394; Friedman’s methodology resists tidy philosophical classification — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 55
Related
- Non-Western literature’s exclusion from the canon is a translation problem, not literary exclusion (similarity 0.81)
- Metropolitan literatures distort any theory of third-world writing built from them. (similarity 0.79)
- Metropolitan theory idealized the singularized Third World as the site of cultural opposition (similarity 0.79)
- No text is necessarily determined by its country of origin (similarity 0.79)
- Globalist frameworks can reproduce the imperial binary they oppose (similarity 0.78)