Writers must administer linguistic shocks to overcome readers’ numbed sense of the concrete

Evidence

It is clear, for instance, that a few bare names and plain nouns, a minimum of description, had a suggestive value for the readers of earlier centuries that they now no longer possess in that overexposure to language which is characteristic of our own time. Thus style resembles the Red Queen, developing ever more complicated mechanisms in order to sustain the power to say the same thing; and in the commercial universe of late capitalism the serious writer is obliged to reawaken the reader’s numbed sense of the concrete through the administration of linguistic shocks, by restructuring the overfamiliar or by appealing to those deeper layers of the physiological which alone retain a kind of fitful unnamed intensity. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 63

Categorization

• XREF: The Red Queen formulation and the numbed reader evoke Benjamin’s and Adorno’s accounts of commodified perception under late capitalism — connects directly to Jameson’s broader project on modernism as the defamiliarization of a reified world. — connects to: Writers must intentionally shock their psyches to generate charged prose.; Writers should leave readers hungry and mildly estranged, not fully accommodated — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 873; Good political writing should calm readers rather than shock them — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 748 (+5 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies Jameson’s version of the dialectical claim that style’s difficulty is not a matter of individual temperament but of a historically determined relation to a saturated linguistic environment.

Broader Connections

• Writers must intentionally shock their psyches to generate charged prose. #expands (0.90)
• Writers should leave readers hungry and mildly estranged, not fully accommodated #corroborates (0.85) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 873
• Good political writing should calm readers rather than shock them #contradicts (0.80) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 748
• Novelists aim to jolt the heart and dispose readers to otherness #corroborates (0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 546
• Novelists should give couture responses, not off-the-rack clichés #expands (0.75) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 14
• Untranslated aesthetic concepts force readers to feel meaning between words #expands (0.75)
• Literary works are unfinished gestures made intelligible only by their situation #qualifies (0.70) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 735