Ritualistic, unconscious devices structure literary form and decay with social fragmentation

Evidence

Experience is moreover socially conditioned in that it depends on a certain rhythm of recurrences and similarities in events which are properly cultural in origin. Thus even in Proust and Baudelaire, who lived in relatively fragmented societies, ritualistic devices, often unconscious, are primary elements in the construction of form: we recognize them in the “vie antérieure” and the correspondences of Baudelaire, in the ceremonies of salon life in Proust. And where the modern writer tries to create a perpetual present—as in Kafka—the mystery inherent in the events seems to result not so much from their novelty as from the feeling that they have merely been forgotten, that they are in some sense “familiar,” in the haunting significance which Baudelaire lent that word. Yet as society increasingly decays, such rhythms of experience are less and less available. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 144

Categorization

• XREF: Ties into Benjamin’s auratic experience and the decay of ritual, connecting to Jameson’s larger Frankfurt-School project and to the reader’s existing Benjamin material. — connects to: Literary forms depend on the social structure of the experience they arise from. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 697; A writer’s formal method determines which social realities remain inaccessible to him — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 784; Loss of temporal coherence in the subject produces fragmentary, aleatory cultural forms. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 95 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Loss of temporal coherence in the subject produces fragmentary, aleatory cultural forms. #expands (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 95
• Postmodern mental fragmentation internalizes social division of labor into cognition itself #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 789
• Western literature has descended socially and moved inward toward the unconscious #qualifies (0.75) — Janet Burroway; Elizabeth Stuckey-French; Ned Stuckey-French, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition, 297