"The foregrounding of style is hardly new with postmodernism, of course. It is already characteristic of the earliest modernist writing -- Flaubert, Henry James. Flaubert in particular is responsible for introducing what Jonathon Culler has called a 'labor theory of value,' whereby the aesthetic value of verbal art is to be measured in terms of the amount of work that has gone into the production of the linguistic surface." [Brian McHale. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction, pp. 148f., with a footnote on p. 248 to Jonathon Culler's Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, pp. 12f.]

When I first recalled this text after having read it some days [weeks?] earlier, I misremembered its key phrase as "the amount of work that goes into decoding the linguistic surface." Then, I couldn't find the passage at all, even though I searched every couple of months for it, usually after having mentioned to somebody Culler's "labor theory of value." When I found the page it was on and read in disbelief that it wasn't making a work difficult to read but difficult to write, I was embarassed.