Literary works generate the very situations they also react against

Evidence

Insofar, in other words, as symbolic action-what Burke will map as “dream,” “prayer,” or “chart”60-is a way of doing something to the world, to that degree what we are calling “world” must inhere within it, as the content it has to take up into itself in order to submit it to the transformations of form. The symbolic act therefore begins by generating and producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back from it, t.ूking its measure with a view toward its own projects of transformation. The whole paradox of what we have here called the subtext may be summed up in’ this, that the literary work or cultural object, as though for the first time, brings into being that very situation to which it is also, at one and the same time, a reaction. It articulates its own situation and textualizes it, thereby encouraging and perpetuating the illusion that the situation itself did not exist before it, that there is nothing but a text, that there never was any extraor con-textual reality before the text itself gener­ ated it in the form of a mirage. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1786

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ‘subtext’ is defined here as the paradox that a text brings into being the situation to which it reacts.
• XREF: connects to: The same literary form can either contest or reinforce hegemonic narratives — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 18; Literary form can reproduce or contest power’s value judgments — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 422; Literature can contest imperial narratives by exposing their ongoing compromises (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Literary form can reproduce or contest power’s value judgments #exemplifies (0.85) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 422
• The same literary form can either contest or reinforce hegemonic narratives #exemplifies (0.82) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 18
• Literature can contest imperial narratives by exposing their ongoing compromises #exemplifies (0.80)