The category of literature is ambiguously constructed rather than given

Evidence

Jameson speaks so often of ‘all third-world texts’, insists so much on a singular form of narrativity for Third World Literature, that not to take him literally is to violate the very terms of his discourse. Yet one knows of so many texts from one’s own part of the world which do not fit the description of ‘national allegory’ that one wonders why Jameson insists so much on the category, ‘all’. Without this category, of course, he cannot produce a theory of Third World Literature. But is it also the case that he means the opposite of what he actually says: not that ‘all third-world texts are to be read … as national allegories’ but that only those texts which give us national allegories can be admitted as authentic texts of Third World Literature, while the rest are by definition excluded? — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 169 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Literary works are unfinished gestures made intelligible only by their situation — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 735; European-style national-literature categories distort India’s actual interlingual literary relations — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1095; A totalizing theory silently excludes texts that contradict its category — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 169 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• A totalizing theory silently excludes texts that contradict its category #complicates (0.82) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 169