Critics internalize the highbrow canon until they stop desiring anything beyond it

Evidence

What they subjectively fancy radical, belongs objectively so entirely to the compartment in the pattern reserved for their like, that radicalism is debased to abstract prestige, legitimation for those who know what an intellectual nowadays has to be for and what against. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 228 (#expands, via linked claim)

Because Professor Redish’s formal expectations were so entrenched, he was apparently disabled entirely from even suspecting that something was going on in a book other than the failure to do the only thing he thought could be done with the subject. — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 581 (#expands, via linked claim)

Genre criticism thereby recovers its freedom and opens up a new space for the creative construction of experimental entities, such as Lukacs’ reading of Solzhenitsyn in terms of an invented “genre” that might be termed the “closed laboratory situation, ” which project their “dia­ chronic constructs ” only the more surely to return to the synchronic historical situation in which such novels can be·read as symbolic acts. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3434 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Entrenched formal expectations prevent critics from recognizing genre innovation. — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 581; Genre criticism becomes a creative enterprise when freed from canonical rigidities — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3434; Radicalism among critics is reduced to abstract prestige within an allotted pattern — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 228

Broader Connections

• Radicalism among critics is reduced to abstract prestige within an allotted pattern #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 228
• Entrenched formal expectations prevent critics from recognizing genre innovation. #expands (0.75) — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 581
• Genre criticism becomes a creative enterprise when freed from canonical rigidities #contradicts (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3434