Dialectical criticism lets each work dictate its own interpretive categories

Evidence

For a genuinely dialectical criticism, indeed, there can be no preestablished categories of analysis: to the degree that each work is the end result of a kind of inner logic or development in its own content, it evolves its own categories and dictates the specific terms of its own interpretation. Thus dialectical criticism is at the other extreme from all single-shot or univalent aesthetic theories which seek the same structure in all works of art and prescribe for them a single type of interpretive technique or a single mode of explanation. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 678

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clear statement of what dialectical criticism’s method is — each work evolving its own categories — versus univalent theories.
• XREF: This is the heart of Jameson’s Frankfurt-School lineage — the anti-systematic dialectical method indebted to Adorno against totalizing aesthetic systems. — connects to: Dialectical criticism judges a work by how its strengths structurally require its weaknesses — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 682; Dialectical thinking generates its categories from the content’s own inner logic. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 681; The work’s autonomy is itself a dialectical, historically variable phenomenon — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 646 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Dialectical criticism judges a work by how its strengths structurally require its weaknesses #complicates (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 682