Plot analysis is possible only when plot foregrounds itself as consumable.

Evidence

Yet for such a theory, the restrictions indicated above would hold in even stronger measure: for insofar as in the narrative work plot is the very ground of the concrete itself, there can be no independent analysis of it. It simply coincides with the work itself, as do the functional “descriptions” which normally supply the bulk of what are analyzed as “images.” Plot becomes susceptible of analysis only to the degree that it somehow attracts attention to itself as something to be consumed in its own right, as something “foregrounded,” standing out in relief from the work as a whole. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 758

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The key methodological move of Postmodernism: only the foregrounded, self-consuming, ‘well-made’ plot — not plot as such — is analyzable historically. This is the reflexive historicizing logic that structures Jameson’s whole method.
• XREF: The foregrounding/reflexivity logic connects to Russian Formalism’s defamiliarization and to Jameson’s critique in Postmodernism of the well-made plot as a modernist symptom.