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“Always historicize!”, exclaims Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, although to tell the truth I actually tracked down where the quote came from on his Wikipedia page.1 It sounds definitive, determinative, orthodoxly Marxist, until one reads the book carefully and realizes that he is in fact suggesting the opposite: that at the end of this process of “historicization” we will discover what it is about the work of art that cannot be historicized, cannot be explained by history, that remains outside of its designated time and place.