Understanding an author requires differential sequence positioning, not isolated study

Evidence

For us, however, for whom the word “order” no longer has the value of a fetish, the concept of a global totality is not as methodologically useful as the smaller idea of limited sequences which are modified by the addition of a new term, itself perceived against the continuum of which it is a part. … That Flaubert is sui generis is to say nothing; but that he is no longer Balzac, that he is not yet Zola, and this in a host of determinate ways, is to articulate the structures inherent in and constitutive of the novel of Flaubert. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 647

Categorization

• XREF: This is Jameson’s methodological debt to Saussurean differential value and to the Frankfurt School’s negative dialectics — reading an author as a determined negation of predecessors rather than a positive essence.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that monographic criticism structurally falsifies through artificial isolation, and that writers’ self-presentation as a ‘world’ is itself a phenomenon to study, is a dense methodological position worth sitting with.