Literary forms depend on the social structure of the experience they arise from.
Evidence
It is a forgotten truism to say that forms such as the epic, the costume tragedy, the epistolary novel are inherently dependent for their existence on possibilities in their content, or in other words on the structure of the social experience which they use as raw material and from which they spring as artifacts. … Hegel thus distinguishes the structural peculiarity of capitalism in terms of the dilemma it poses as potential content for the work of art: to constitute a collective totality which fails to have any existential equivalent in individual experience, to determine individual reality while remaining structurally inaccessible to the categories of the latter’s understanding or image-making power. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 697
Categorization
- XREF: This is the core dialogical-theory premise shared with Lukács (‘world of prose’ vs epic totality) and connects to Benjamin’s and Adorno’s readings of form-content mediation. — connects to: Socio-historical reading can locate a poem’s moment of composition in society — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2222; Ritualistic, unconscious devices structure literary form and decay with social fragmentation — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 144; Literary form can reproduce or contest power’s value judgments — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 422 (+3 more)
- DEFINE: Defines the Frankfurt-school notion that form is not autonomous but socially determined through its relation to possible content.
Broader Connections
- Literary form can reproduce or contest power’s value judgments
#complicates(0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 422 - Ritualistic, unconscious devices structure literary form and decay with social fragmentation
#expands(0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 144 - Forms of interaction retain identity across varied contents and historical settings
#qualifies(0.72) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 202