Literary criticism is structurally unequipped for oral-performative texts
Evidence
Considering just these two facts, one may well ask what there is in the disciplinary knowledge of a literary critic, other than the presumed sensitivity to ranges of verbal meaning in the printed form, which prepares one to approach such artefacts. Literary criticism, a product of print capitalism, presumes the existence of printed texts; it presumes stable textual objects, even when comparison of texts is to be undertaken and the objective is, precisely, to establish a stable text; it distinguishes itself from other ways of knowing by choosing for itself objects which are said to disclose their meanings primarily through their verbal construction; at its widest, it admits biographical background, social origins of the author, the sociology of aesthetic effects; but it presses us to return, always, to poems as printed units in relation to other poems, also as printed units. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 500
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines criticism as a print-capitalism artifact built on assumptions of stable printed objects.
- XREF: Connects to McLuhan’s print culture thesis and to the New Criticism pedagogy critique Ahmad names next. — connects to: Literary works are unfinished gestures made intelligible only by their situation — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 735; Local oral literatures resist absorption into any unified Third World Literature category — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 318; Oral traditional stories resist the individual-author citation norms of academic literature — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1432 (+1 more)