Which choice most logically completes the text? | Verbal SAT Question

Gustav Frank and Madleen Podewski have observed that although serialized publication and a continuous publication cycle mark periodicals as quite distinct from other objects of literary analysis, the periodical is insufficiently theorized as a unique form, leaving scholars heavily reliant on methods of literary criticism developed for analyzing other types of texts, as well as methods arising from other fields entirely, such as communication studies. However, literary-critical methodologies in particular make assumptions about authorial control that to be tenable must be restricted to forms like novels, poems, and plays. Frank and Podewski thus caution that even as periodical studies has emerged as an independent discipline, it

Which choice most logically completes the text?

risks producing scholarship that fails to attend to the defining characteristics of the field’s object of study.

could be ill-equipped to identify the approaches within literary criticism that account for the ways in which periodicals differ from other literary forms.

may fail to make valid claims about the social and historical contexts within which popular periodicals were created and disseminated.

is in danger of being unable to justify continued scholarly attention to a literary form that is characterized mainly by its transience.