Typologizing readers denies the contingency central to literary meaning

Evidence

To classify readers in this way is a denial of contingency, which seems a particular loss when talking about literature. Deconstruction has taught us that taking contingency into account entails the immense labor of forging a style that seems only to bewilder. If literary study is to work with established metropolitan colonial history, it seems best that one stay with the outlines of rational agency and give a hint of postcolonial heterogeneity according to the impoverished conventions of mere reasonableness.) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1966

Categorization

• XREF: Direct methodological caveat for the reader’s whole classification project: any fixed rubric-holding of identity runs the same denial-of-contingency risk Spivak flags against her own reader typology. — connects to: Untranslated aesthetic concepts force readers to feel meaning between words; Literary works are unfinished gestures made intelligible only by their situation — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 735; Interpretive reading gains purchase only where postmodern signifiers reduce to binary oppositions.

Broader Connections

• Literary works are unfinished gestures made intelligible only by their situation #corroborates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 735
• Interpretive reading gains purchase only where postmodern signifiers reduce to binary oppositions. #corroborates (0.75)
• Untranslated aesthetic concepts force readers to feel meaning between words #contradicts (0.72)