Literary works are unfinished gestures made intelligible only by their situation

Evidence

But for a Marxist criticism, the work is precisely not complete in itself but is handed down to us as a kind of gesture or verbal thrust incomprehensible unless we are able to understand the situation in which the gesture was first made, and the interlocutors to whom it was a reply. This is to say that for Marxism, the passage from the literary to the socio-economic or to the historical is not the passage from one specialized discipline to another, but rather the movement from specialization to the concrete itself. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 735

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core of Jameson’s dialectical method of totalization — connects to Lukács’s totality and Adorno’s insistence on situating artworks within social constellations. — connects to: Literary criticism is structurally unequipped for oral-performative texts — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 500; Literary works generate the very situations they also react against — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1786; Writers lack a clear signal that their piece is complete — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 46 (+4 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that moving from literature to the socio-economic is not interdisciplinary but a movement from specialization to the concrete is a dense, paradigm-reorganizing formulation of what Marxist cultural criticism actually does.

Broader Connections

• Literary works generate the very situations they also react against #responds-to (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1786
• Literary criticism is structurally unequipped for oral-performative texts #expands (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 500
• The category of literature is ambiguously constructed rather than given #expands (0.75)
• Writers lack a clear signal that their piece is complete #corroborates (0.72) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 46