Shifting from a lost golden age to a future reconciliation fundamentally reorders literary history.

Evidence

We may state this contradiction in another way by recalling the degree to which all of Lukács’ analyses of the novel depend on what is a kind of literary nostalgia, on the notion of a golden age or lost Utopia of narration in Greek epic. No doubt, as we indicated above, such a conception of literary history may simply be taken as an organizational fiction, as a mythological framework, for the concrete analyses of the book; yet in the long run, the historical inadmissibility of the framework returns to vitiate the individual analyses. By the same token, any change in the framework will entail a far-reaching reevaluation of the empirical history of the novel itself. Obviously the ultimate realization of a reconciled universe will now be projected into the future, and with such a shift in perspective we are already well within a Marxist theory of history. But more than this, we would expect the removal of the idea of a golden age to result in a new interpretation of modern literature as well, and to allow for the possibility of at least partial moments of reconciliation in modern times, of at least isolated examples of genuinely concrete works of art, in a way which the overall historical scheme of the Theory of the Novel seemed to preclude. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 369

Categorization

• XREF: This is the hinge of the Lukács-to-Marxism trajectory Jameson traces; connects to Benjamin’s angel of history and to the reader’s dialectical-criticism framework. — connects to: Literary periodization must rest on culture-wide material shifts, not chronology — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 487; The myth of inevitable change masks the class-serving reality of historical rupture; Literary history is constructed by arbitrarily isolating one element as the diachronic thread — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 648 (+3 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that Lukács’s entire novel theory rests on a historically inadmissible nostalgia, and that replacing it with a futural reconciliation transforms the empirical reading of all modern literature, is a paradigm-level move worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Literary periodization must rest on culture-wide material shifts, not chronology #expands (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 487
• Literary history is constructed by arbitrarily isolating one element as the diachronic thread #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 648
• The myth of inevitable change masks the class-serving reality of historical rupture #complicates (0.75)
• Cinema resurrects history precisely because history has lost its real referential force. #qualifies (0.72) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 157
• Nations construct their biographies backwards through time from an originary present #exemplifies (0.72) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 748
• Higher culture’s remembered images point to a future that dissolves the present order. #responds-to (0.70) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 290