We need to talk about what kind of data literature is, to recognize that it may in fact be multiple kinds of data, each of which operates differently in relation to different scales of historical determination (the moment, the event, the month, the century, the era).

Eric Hayot, Persistent Forms, x

To grasp [the] discontinuity [between style and narrative] . . . requires us to radically historicize the gap between style and narrative, which then may be seen as an event in the history of form. The name of Flaubert is a useful marker for this development, in which the two "levels" of the narrative text begin to drift apart and acquire their own relative autonomy; in which the rhetorical and instrumental subordination of narrative language to narrative representation can no longer be taken for granted. The plotless art novel and the styleless bestseller can then be seen as the end products of this tendency ....

Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as Fascist, 7