Literary history is constructed by arbitrarily isolating one element as the diachronic thread
Evidence
Yet the word technique is a figure of speech: we will have occasion to reconsider the essentially artisanal model of production which it implies and presupposes. What interests us at the present moment is that gesture by which an element—call it technique or structure, component, or if you will category—is isolated from the work in question in order to set this work in a sequential relationship with others. This is the moment, in other words, of the choice of that around which we will construct a diachronic sequence, that of which we will write the history, that which is seen as having an internal development or dialectical history to tell. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 648
Categorization
- XREF: The method of choosing what to historicize echoes Jameson’s later emphasis on the act of totalization as a constructed gestalt — connects to his Political Unconscious and to Lukács’s totality. — connects to: Traditional literary histories reduce texts to examples and force crude causalities upon them; Shifting from a lost golden age to a future reconciliation fundamentally reorders literary history. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 369; Materialist historiography alone resists the dehistoricizing of canonical texts — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1149