Style as a dominant category is historically contingent, not universal in literature
Evidence
We may put all this in another way by pointing out that works come into being at varying distances from the verbal, and that to say that a work is made of words is not the same as saying that “style” in the modern sense is one of its dominant categories. In much of the novelistic production of the nineteenth century, for instance, style is a relatively less significant element (think of the way in which we secretly modernize Dickens, for example, by thinking of him as a stylist), while the stylistic dimension of a writer such as Racine is inconsequential when compared to the rhetorical one. To define style, however, as language which deliberately calls attention to itself, and “foregrounds” itself as a key element in the work, is to reassert, as over against stylistics, the profoundly historical nature of the phenomenon. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 680 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Adorno’s dense style is a deliberate intransigence against cheap readability — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 18; Style as self-foregrounding language is a modern historical category, not a universal one — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 680; Style is a historically-graspable mark of deliberate making, not mere decoration
Related
- Style as self-foregrounding language is a modern historical category, not a universal one (similarity 0.93)
- Style is a biological density, not a linguistic speed; its referents lie outside language (similarity 0.81)
- Formal concepts retain traces of the historical phenomena that produced them (similarity 0.80)
- Adorno’s dense style is a deliberate intransigence against cheap readability (similarity 0.78)
- Style, not theme, is a fiction’s deepest concrete subject. (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Style as self-foregrounding language is a modern historical category, not a universal one
#corroborates(1.00) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 680 - Style is a historically-graspable mark of deliberate making, not mere decoration
#expands(0.80)