Dialectical criticism unites category-isolation with diachronic sequencing.

Evidence

Such an extended illustration should serve to underline the inseparable link between what we have called the isolation of the category (the definition of the object of study, whether it be image, style, point of view, character, or those more transitory and unnamed literary phenomena which are the very substance of modern literature itself) and that articulation into a succession of alternative structural realizations which we have called the diachronic sequence or construct, and which, always implied in the very intuition of the category itself, constitutes the concrete working out of the latter by the critic. Thus these two moments stand together as the inaugural gesture of a genuinely dialectical literary criticism, of what we will call its Hegelian mode, to be distinguished later on from the specifically Marxist. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 659

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the two inaugural moments of dialectical criticism — ‘isolation of the category’ and ‘diachronic sequence’ — and names the ‘Hegelian mode’ as distinct from the Marxist one to come. Central to the reader’s method-tracing goal.
• XREF: The ‘Hegelian mode’ of criticism to be distinguished ‘later on from the specifically Marxist’ is exactly the Adorno/Lukács distinction the reader is tracking; this is a roadmap moment. — connects to: Dialectical analysis begins by isolating key factors from the historical continuum; Dialectical relationships require a diachronic framework to be articulated; Dialectical criticism of superstructures shifts from causal point-field analysis to homology between two continua — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 44