Fredric Jameson (born April 14, 1934) is an
American literary critic and Marxist political
theorist.
He is best known for his analysis of contemporary
cultural trends, particularly his analysis
of postmodernity and capitalism.
Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism,
or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
Jameson is currently Knut Schmidt-Nielsen
Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance
Studies (French) and the director of the Center
for Critical Theory at Duke University.
In 2012, the Modern Language Association gave
Jameson its sixth Award for Lifetime Scholarly
Achievement.
== Life and works ==
Jameson was born in Cleveland, Ohio.
After graduating in 1954 from Haverford College,
where his professors included Wayne Booth,
he briefly traveled to Europe, studying at
Aix-en-Provence, Munich, and Berlin, where
he learned of new developments in continental
philosophy, including the rise of structuralism.
He returned to America the following year
to pursue a doctoral degree at Yale University,
where he studied under Erich Auerbach.
=== Early works ===
Auerbach would prove to be a lasting influence
on Jameson's thought.
This was already apparent in Jameson's doctoral
dissertation, published in 1961 as Sartre:
the Origins of a Style.
Auerbach's concerns were rooted in the German
philological tradition; his works on the history
of style analyzed literary form within social
history.
Jameson would follow in these steps, examining
the articulation of poetry, history, philology,
and philosophy in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Jameson's work focused on the relation between
the style of Sartre's writings and the political
and ethical positions of his existentialist
philosophy.
The occasional Marxian aspects of Sartre's
work were glossed over in this book; Jameson
would return to them in the following decade.Jameson's
dissertation, though it drew on a long tradition
of European cultural analysis, differed markedly
from the prevailing trends of Anglo-American
academia (which were empiricism and logical
positivism in philosophy and linguistics,
and New Critical formalism in literary criticism).
It nevertheless earned Jameson a position
at Harvard University, where he taught during
the first half of the 1960s.
=== Research into Marxism ===
His interest in Sartre led Jameson to intense
study of Marxist literary theory.
Even though Karl Marx was becoming an important
influence in American social science, partly
through the influence of the many European
intellectuals who had sought refuge from the
Second World War in the United States, such
as Theodor Adorno, the literary and critical
work of the Western Marxists was still largely
unknown in American academia in the late 1950s
and early 1960s.Jameson's shift toward Marxism
was also driven by his increasing political
connection with the New Left and pacifist
movements, as well as by the Cuban Revolution,
which Jameson took as a sign that "Marxism
was alive and well as a collective movement
and a culturally productive force".
His research focused on critical theory: thinkers
of, and influenced by, the Frankfurt School,
such as Kenneth Burke, György Lukács, Ernst
Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert
Marcuse, Louis Althusser, and Sartre, who
viewed cultural criticism as an integral feature
of Marxist theory.
This position represented a break with more
orthodox Marxism-Leninism, which held a narrow
view of historical materialism.
In 1969, Jameson co-founded the Marxist Literary
Group with a number of his graduate students
at the University of California, San Diego.While
the Orthodox Marxist view of ideology held
that the cultural "superstructure" was completely
determined by the economic "base", the Western
Marxists critically analyzed culture as a
historical and social phenomenon alongside
economic production and distribution or political
power relationships.
They held that culture must be studied using
the Hegelian concept of immanent critique:
the theory that adequate description and criticism
of a philosophical or cultural text must be
carried out in the same terms that text itself
employs, in order to develop its internal
inconsistencies in a manner that allows intellectual
advancement.
Marx highlighted immanent critique in his
early writings, derived from Hegel's development
of a new form of dialectical thinking that
would attempt, as Jameson comments, "to lift
itself mightily up by its own bootstraps".
=== Narrative and history ===
History came to play an increasingly central
role in Jameson's interpretation of both the
reading (consumption) and writing (production)
of literary texts.
Jameson marked his full-fledged commitment
to Hegelian-Marxist philosophy with the publication
of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as
a Socially Symbolic Act, the opening slogan
of which is "always historicize" (1981).
The Political Unconscious takes as its object
not the literary text itself, but rather the
interpretive frameworks by which it is now
constructed.
It emerges as a manifesto for new activity
concerning literary narrative.
The book's argument emphasized history as
the "ultimate horizon" of literary and cultural
analysis.
It borrowed notions from the structuralist
tradition and from Raymond Williams's work
in cultural studies, and joined them to a
largely Marxist view of labor (whether blue-collar
or intellectual) as the focal point of analysis.
Jameson's readings exploited both the explicit
formal and thematic choices of the writer
and the unconscious framework guiding these.
Artistic choices that were ordinarily viewed
in purely aesthetic terms were recast in terms
of historical literary practices and norms,
in an attempt to develop a systematic inventory
of the constraints they imposed on the artist
as an individual creative subject.
To further this meta-commentary, Jameson described
the ideologeme, or "the smallest intelligible
unit of the essentially antagonistic collective
discourses of social classes", the smallest
legible residue of the real-life, ongoing
struggles occurring between social classes.
(The term "ideologeme" was first used by Mikhail
Bakhtin and Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev in
their work The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship
and was later popularised by Julia Kristeva.
Kristeva defined it as "the intersection of
a given textual arrangement ... with the utterances
... that it either assimilates into its own
space or to which it refers in the space of
exterior texts ...".)
Jameson's establishment of history as the
only pertinent factor in this analysis, which
derived the categories governing artistic
production from their historical framework,
was paired with a bold theoretical claim.
His book claimed to establish Marxian literary
criticism, centered in the notion of an artistic
mode of production, as the most all-inclusive
and comprehensive theoretical framework for
understanding literature.
According to Vincent B. Leitch, the publication
of The Political Unconscious "rendered Jameson
the leading Marxist literary critic in America."
=== The critique of postmodernism ===
In 1984, during his tenure as Professor of
Literature and History of Consciousness at
the University of California, Santa Cruz,
Jameson published an article titled "Postmodernism,
or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism"
in the journal New Left Review.
This controversial article, which Jameson
later expanded into a book, was part of a
series of analyses of postmodernism from the
dialectical perspective Jameson had developed
in his earlier work on narrative.
Jameson viewed the postmodern "skepticism
towards metanarratives" as a "mode of experience"
stemming from the conditions of intellectual
labor imposed by the late capitalist mode
of production.
Postmodernists claimed that the complex differentiation
between "spheres" or fields of life (such
as the political, the social, the cultural,
the commercial), and between distinct social
classes and roles within each field, had been
overcome by the crisis of foundationalism
and the consequent relativization of truth-claims.
Jameson argued against this, asserting that
these phenomena had or could have been understood
successfully within a modernist framework;
the postmodern failure to achieve this understanding
implied an abrupt break in the dialectical
refinement of thought.
In his view, postmodernity's merging of all
discourse into an undifferentiated whole was
the result of the colonization of the cultural
sphere, which had retained at least partial
autonomy during the prior modernist era, by
a newly organized corporate capitalism.
Following Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis
of the culture industry, Jameson discussed
this phenomenon in his critical discussion
of architecture, film, narrative, and visual
arts, as well as in his strictly philosophical
work.
Two of Jameson's best-known claims from Postmodernism
are that postmodernity is characterized by
pastiche and a crisis in historicity.
Jameson argued that parody (which implies
a moral judgment or a comparison with societal
norms) was replaced by pastiche (collage and
other forms of juxtaposition without a normative
grounding).
Relatedly, Jameson argued that the postmodern
era suffers from a crisis in historicity:
"there no longer does seem to be any organic
relationship between the American history
we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience
of the current, multinational, high-rise,
stagflated city of the newspapers and of our
own everyday life".
Jameson's analysis of postmodernism attempted
to view it as historically grounded; he therefore
explicitly rejected any moralistic opposition
to postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon,
and continued to insist upon a Hegelian immanent
critique that would "think the cultural evolution
of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe
and progress all together".
His failure to dismiss postmodernism from
the onset, however, was perceived by many
as an implicit endorsement of postmodern views.
=== Recent work ===
Jameson's later writings include Archaeologies
of the Future, a study of utopia and science
fiction, launched at Monash University in
Melbourne, Australia, in December 2005, and
The Modernist Papers (2007), a collection
of essays on modernism that is meant to accompany
the theoretical A Singular Modernity (2002)
as a "source-book".
These books, along with Postmodernism and
The Antinomies of Realism (2013), form part
of an ongoing study entitled The Poetics of
Social Forms, which attempts, in Sara Danius's
words, to "provide a general history of aesthetic
forms, at the same time seeking to show how
this history can be read in tandem with a
history of social and economic formations".
As of 2010, Jameson intends to supplement
the already published volumes of The Poetics
of Social Forms with a study of allegory entitled
Overtones: The Harmonics of Allegory.
The Antinomies of Realism won the 2014 Truman
Capote Award for Literary Criticism.Alongside
this continuing project, he has recently published
three related studies of dialectical theory:
Valences of the Dialectic (2009), which includes
Jameson's critical responses to Slavoj Žižek,
Gilles Deleuze, and other contemporary theorists;
The Hegel Variations (2010), a commentary
on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit; and Representing
Capital: A Reading of Volume One (2011), an
analysis of Marx's Das Kapital.
An overview of Jameson's work, Fredric Jameson:
Live Theory, by Ian Buchanan, was published
in 2007.
=== Holberg International Memorial Prize ===
In 2008, Jameson was awarded the annual Holberg
International Memorial Prize in recognition
of his career-long research "on the relation
between social formations and cultural forms".
The prize, which was worth 4.6 million kr
(approximately $648,000), was presented to
Jameson by Tora Aasland, Norwegian Minister
of Education and Research, in Bergen, Norway,
on 26 November 2008.
=== Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar
Award ===
In 2009, Jameson was awarded the Lyman Tower
Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award by the
North American Society for Utopian Studies.
=== Influence in China ===
Jameson has had an enormous influence, perhaps
greater than that of any other single figure
of any nationality, on the theorization of
the postmodern in China.
In mid-1985, shortly after the beginning of
the cultural fever (early 1985 to June Fourth,
1989)—a period in Chinese intellectual history
characterized in part by intense interest
in Western critical theory, literary theory,
and related disciplines—Jameson introduced
the idea of postmodernism to China in lectures
at Peking University and the newly founded
Shenzhen University.
These were minor events amid the larger cultural
ferment, yet ended up being quietly seminal:
Jameson's ideas as presented at Peking University
had a major impact on some gifted young students,
including Zhang Yiwu and Zhang Xudong, budding
scholars whose work would come to play an
important role in the analysis of postmodernity
in China.Notwithstanding the impact of these
lectures on a few future intellectuals, 1987
was the year of Jameson's truly enormous contribution
to postmodern studies in China: a book entitled
Postmodernism and Cultural Theories (Chinese:
后现代主义与文化理论; pinyin: Hòuxiàndàizhǔyì
yǔ wénhuà lǐlùn), translated into Chinese
by Tang Xiaobing.
Although the Chinese intelligentsia's engagement
with postmodernism would not begin in earnest
until the nineties, Postmodernism and Cultural
Theories was to become a keystone text in
that engagement; as scholar Wang Ning writes,
its influence on Chinese thinkers would be
impossible to overestimate.
Its popularity may be partially due to the
facts that it was not written in a scholarly
style and that, because of Jameson's specific
critical approach, it was possible to use
the text to support either praise or criticism
of the Chinese manifestation of postmodernity.
In Wang Chaohua's interpretation of events,
Jameson's work was mostly used to support
praise, in what amounted to a fundamental
misreading of Jameson:
The caustic edge of Jameson's theory, which
had described postmodernism as "the cultural
logic of late capitalism," was abandoned for
a contented or even enthusiastic endorsement
of mass culture, which [a certain group of
Chinese critics] saw as a new space of popular
freedom.
According to these critics, intellectuals,
who conceived of themselves as the bearers
of modernity, were reacting with shock and
anxiety at their loss of control with the
arrival of postmodern consumer society, uttering
cries of "quixotic hysteria," panic-stricken
by the realization of what they had once called
for during the eighties.
The debate fueled by Jameson, and specifically
Postmodernism and Cultural Theories, over
postmodernism was at its most intense from
1994 to 1997, carried on by Chinese intellectuals
both inside and outside the mainland; particularly
important contributions came from Zhao Yiheng
in London, Xu Ben in the United States, and
Zhang Xudong, also in the United States, who
had gone on to study under Jameson as a doctoral
student at Duke.
== Bibliography ==
Bibliography at Jameson's Duke University
faculty page
=== Books ===
Sartre: The Origins of a Style.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
1961.
Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical
Theories of Literature.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
1971.
The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account
of Structuralism and Russian Formalism.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
1972. for more info see:[1]
Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist
as Fascist.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
1979.
Reissued: 2008 (Verso)
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Socially Symbolic Act.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
1981.
The Ideologies of Theory.
Essays 1971–1986.
Vol. 1: Situations of Theory.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
1988.
The Ideologies of Theory.
Essays 1971–1986.
Vol. 2: The Syntax of History.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
1988.
Postmodernism and Cultural Theories (Chinese:
后现代主义与文化理论; pinyin: Hòuxiàndàizhǔyì
yǔ wénhuà lǐlùn).
Tr.
Tang Xiaobing.
Xi'an: Shaanxi Normal University Press.
1987.
Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature.
Derry: Field Day, 1988.
A collection of three Field Day Pamphlets
by Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton and Edward
Said.
Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence
of the Dialectic.
London & New York: Verso.
1990.
Signatures of the Visible.
New York & London: Routledge.
1990.
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
1991.
The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space
in the World System.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
1992.
The Seeds of Time.
The Wellek Library lectures at the University
of California, Irvine.
New York: Columbia University Press.
1994.
Brecht and Method.
London & New York: Verso.
1998.
Reissued: 2011 (Verso)
The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the
Postmodern, 1983-1998.
London & New York: Verso.
1998.
Reissued: 2009 (Verso)
The Jameson Reader.
Ed.
Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks.
Oxford: Blackwell.
2000.
A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology
of the Present.
London & New York Verso.
2002.
Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called
Utopia and Other Science Fictions.
London & New York: Verso.
2005.
The Modernist Papers.
London & New York Verso.
2007.
Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural
Marxism.
Ed.
Ian Buchanan.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2007.
The Ideologies of Theory.
London & New York: Verso.
2009.
(One-volume edition, with additional essays)
Valences of the Dialectic.
London & New York: Verso.
2009.
The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology
of Spirit.
London & New York: Verso.
2010.
Representing 'Capital': A Reading of Volume
One.
London & New York: Verso.
2011.
The Antinomies of Realism.
London & New York: Verso.
2013.
The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity
of Forms.
London & New York: Verso.
2015.
An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal
Army.
Ed.
Slavoj Žižek.
London and New York: Verso.
2016.
Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality.
London and New York: Verso.
2016.
=== Selected articles ===
"Metacommentary".
PMLA.
86 (1).
January 1971.
"Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture".
Social Text.
1.
Winter 1979.
"Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism".
New Left Review.
New Left Review.
I (146).
July–August 1984.
"Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism".
Social Text.
15.
Autumn 1986.
"Globalization and Political Strategy".
New Left Review.
New Left Review.
II (4).
July–August 2000.
"Future City".
New Left Review.
New Left Review.
II (21).
May–June 2003.
"Fear and Loathing in Globalization".
New Left Review.
New Left Review.
II (23).
September–October 2003.
"Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?".
Critical Inquiry.
30 (2).
Winter 2003.
Archived from the original on 2007-08-06.
"The Politics of Utopia".
New Left Review.
New Left Review.
II (25).
January–February 2004.
"War and Representation".
PMLA.
124 (5).
October 2009.
"The Aesthetics of Singularity".
New Left Review.
II (92).
March–April 2015.
"On Re-reading Life and Fate".
New Left Review.
II (95).
September–October 2015.
"Gherman's Anti-Aesthetic".
New Left Review.
II (97).
January–February 2016.
"Marxist Criticism and Hegel".
PMLA.
131 (2).
March 2016.
=== Selected book reviews ===
First Impressions, a review of The Parallax
View by Slavoj Žižek (London Review of Books
September 7, 2006)
Then You Are Them, a review of The Year of
the Flood by Margaret Atwood (London Review
of Books September 10, 2009)
In Hyperspace, a review of Time Travel: The
Popular Philosophy of Narrative by David Wittenberg
(London Review of Books September 10, 2015)
No Magic, No Metaphor, a review of One Hundred
Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
(London Review of Books June 15, 2017)
=== Selected interviews ===
Topical excerpts from interviews at the Stanford
Presidential Lectures website
== See also ==
== References ==
== Further reading ==
Ahmad, Aijaz.
"Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National
Allegory'".
In In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures.
London and New York: Verso.
1992.
95-122.
Anderson, Perry.
The Origins of Postmodernity.
London and New York: Verso.
1998.
Arac, Jonathan.
"Frederic Jameson and Marxism."
In Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations
for Postmodern Literary Studies.
New York: Columbia University Press.
1987.
261-279.
Balakrishnan, Gopal (November–December 2010).
"The coming contradiction".
New Left Review.
New Left Review.
II (66).
Buchanan, Ian.
Fredric Jameson: Live Theory.
London and New York: Continuum.
2006.
Burnham, Clint.
The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics
of Marxist Theory.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
1995.
Carp, Alex.
"On Fredric Jameson."
Jacobin (magazine) (March 5, 2014).
Davis, Mike (May–June 1985).
"Urban renaissance and the spirit of postmodernism".
New Left Review.
New Left Review.
I (151): 106–113.
Day, Gail.
Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar
Art Theory.
New York: Columbia University Press.
2011.
Dowling, William C. Jameson, Althusser, Marx:
an Introduction to the Political Unconscious.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
1984.
Eagleton, Terry.
"Fredric Jameson: the Politics of Style."
In Against the Grain: Selected Essays 1975-1985.
London: Verso, 1986.
65-78.
Eagleton, Terry (September–October 2009).
"Jameson and Form".
New Left Review.
New Left Review.
II (59): 123–137.
Gatto, Marco.
Fredric Jameson: neomarxismo, dialettica e
teoria della letteratura.
Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino.
2008.
Helmling, Stephen.
The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson:
Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of
Critique.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
2001.
Homer, Sean.
Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism.
New York: Routledge.
1998.
Hullot-Kentor, Robert.
"Suggested Reading: Jameson on Adorno".
In Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays
on Theodor W. Adorno.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
220-233.
Irr, Caren and Ian Buchanan, eds.
On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
2005.
Kellner, Douglas, ed. Jameson/Postmodernism/Critique.
Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press.
1989.
Kellner, Douglas, and Sean Homer, eds.
Fredric Jameson: a Critical Reader.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2004.
Kunkel, Benjamin.
"Into the Big Tent".
London Review of Books 32.8 (April 22, 2010).
12-16.
LaCapra, Dominick.
"Marxism in the Textual Maelstrom: Fredric
Jameson's The Political Unconscious."
In Rethinking Intellectual History.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
1983.
234-267.
Link, Alex.
"The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric
Jameson's Gothic Plots."
Theorising the Gothic.
Eds.
Jerrold E. Hogle and Andrew Smith.
Special issue of Gothic Studies 11.1 (2009):
70-85.
Millay, Thomas J. "Always Historicize!
On Fredric Jameson, the Tea Party, and Theological
Pragmatics."
The Other Journal 22 (2013).
Osborne, Peter.
"A Marxism for the Postmodern?
Jameson's Adorno".
New German Critique 56 (1992): 171-192.
Roberts, Adam.
Fredric Jameson.
New York: Routledge, 2000.
Tally, Robert T. Fredric Jameson: The Project
of Dialectical Criticism.
London: Pluto, 2014.
Tally, Robert T. "Jameson's Project of Cognitive
Mapping."
In Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing
Social and Educational Change.
Ed.
Rolland G. Paulston.
New York: Garland, 1996.
399-416.
Weber, Samuel.
"Capitalising History: Notes on The Political
Unconscious."
In The Politics of Theory.
Ed.
Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen,
and Diana Loxley.
Colchester: University of Essex Press.
1983.
248-264.
West, Cornel.
"Fredric Jameson's Marxist Hermeneutics."
Boundary 2 11.1-2 (1982–83).
177-200.
White, Hayden.
"Getting Out of History: Jameson's Redemption
of Narrative."
In The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse
and Historical Representation.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
1987.
142-168.
