Received criticism fails texts whose authorship, language, and periodization are multiply layered and sedimented.

Evidence

Considering just these rwo facts, one may well ask what there iJ in the disciplinary knowledge of a literary critic, other than the presumed sensitivity to ranges of verbal meaning in the printed form, which prepares one to approach such artefacts. … What happens to this pedagogy, into which we are all recruited, when we approach texts which are forever distributed between word and performance, where layers of language may be several even in the strict philological sense, where authorship is itself frequently layered and sedimented, where undeterminable contradictions of authorial location introduce equally difficult problems of both sociological origin and ideological locations - even of periodization - of individual texts, authors, (J!uvres, given that we often know little about the immediate circumstance of composition even for the text as it comes to us? — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1122

Categorization

• QUESTION: The layered/sedimented authorship problem resonates with strategic essentialism: if textual authority is unfixable, can an essentialist identity claim be held ‘strategically’ by a subject whose own authorship is laminated? Worth chasing.
• XREF: Pairs with David Scott’s ‘the tragedy of colonial design’ reflexivity critique and with Spivak’s problem of the subaltern as unfixable authorial-location. — connects to: Complex literary texts are overdetermined and resist reduction to one factor — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 472

Broader Connections

• Complex literary texts are overdetermined and resist reduction to one factor #expands (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 472