Marc Angenot, Literary History, and the Study of Culture In the Nineteenth Century

Fredric Jameson considers Angenot's work within a broader effort to elaborate a theory, or discern a model, applicable to the study of literary history as a "form" or "genre," and along the way assesses the (literary) work of the nineteenth century in light of 1889, a 1200 page "cube" he deems "a classic if anything ever was." Invoking approaches and works by Adorno, Bakhtin, Balzac, Benjamin, Flaubert, Foucault, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, and Zola, among others, and a range of ways in which Angenot's "story of the year" approach impacts their respective views, Jameson's assessment, like Angenot's, provocatively takes on the task of determining "how to forestall the grim closure of the synchronic and the definitive imprisonment in the past."