Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist renowned for his incisive analysis of contemporary cultural trends. He delves into how cultural phenomena are shaped by the pressures of organized capitalism, famously characterizing postmodernism as the spatialization of culture. Jameson explores the underlying structures of late capitalism that mold these cultural expressions and their connection to prevailing political and social forces. His work provides a profound lens through which to understand the intricate relationship between culture, ideology, and economic power.
This work offers an in-depth examination of dialectical philosophy, highlighting its significance in cultural criticism. The author, a leading figure in the field, explores the intricate relationships between ideas and societal structures, providing insights into how dialectics shapes our understanding of culture. Through rigorous analysis, the book delves into historical and contemporary applications of dialectical thought, making it an essential read for those interested in philosophy and cultural studies.
"A comprehensive new reading of Walter Benjamin's major works, as well as a great number of his less well-known publications, from one of America's foremost cultural and literary critics"-- Provided by publisher
Cultural critic Fredric Jameson, renowned for his incisive studies of the passage of modernism to postmodernism, returns to the movement that dramatically broke with all tradition in search of progress for the first time since his acclaimed A Singular Modernity . The Modernist Papers is a tour de froce of anlysis and criticism, in which Jameson brings his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jameson discusses modernist poetics, including intensive discussions of the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, Joyce, Proust, and Thomas Mann. He explores the peculiarties of the American literary field, taking in William Carlos Williams and the American epic, and examines the language theories of Gertrude Stein. Refusing to see modernism as simply a Western phenomenon he also pays close attention to its Japanese expression; while the complexities of a late modernist representation of twentieth-century politics are articulated in a concluding section on Peter Weiss’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance. Challenging our previous understanding of the literature of this pperiod, this monumental work will come to be regarded as the classic study of modernism.
"This major new work by Fredric Jameson is not a book about 'method,' but it does propose a dialectic capable of holding together in one breath the heterogeneities that reflect our biological individualities, our submersion in collective history and class struggle, and our alienation to a disembodied new world of information and abstraction. Eschewing the arid secularities of philosophy, Walter Benjamin once recommended the alternative of the rich figurality of an older theology; in that spirit we here return to the antiquated Ptolemaic systems of ancient allegory and its multiple levels (a proposal first sketched out in The Political Unconscious); it is tested against the epic complexities of the overtly allegorical works of Dante, Spenser and the Goethe of Faust II, as well as symphonic form in music, and the structure of the novel, postmodern as well as Third World: about which a notorious essay on National Allegory is here reprinted with a theoretical commentary; and an allegorical history of emotion is meanwhile rehearsed from its contemporary, geopolitical context"-- Provided by publisher
This classic collection showcases Fredric Jameson's influential essays that delve into the intersections of culture, politics, and ideology. Renowned for his critical analysis of postmodernism, Jameson explores how cultural artifacts reflect and shape societal structures. His thought-provoking insights challenge readers to reconsider the relationship between art and the socio-economic conditions of their time, making this work a vital contribution to contemporary cultural theory.
Written by the author of Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
this book explores film and film culture through the relationship between the
imaginative world on screen and the historical world onto which it is
projected.
Fredric Jameson’s influential critiques of postmodernism are compiled in this accessible introduction, making his key writings available to a wider audience. Tailored for both students and general readers, the book distills his complex theories, providing insights into his significant contributions to Marxist criticism.
In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful? Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson’s most substantial work since Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, investigates the development of this form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of utopian thinking in a post-Communist age. The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness … alien life and alien worlds … and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson’s essential essays, including “The Desire Called Utopia,” conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.
In the name of an assault on “totalization” and “identity,” a number of contemporary theorists have been busily washing Marxism’s dialectical and utopian projects down the plug-hole of postmodernism and “post-politics.” A case in point is recent interpretation of one of the greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Theodor Adorno. In this powerful book, Fredric Jameson proposes a radically different reading of Adorno’s work, especially of his major works on philosophy and Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory.Jameson argues persuasively that Adorno’s contribution to the development of Marxism remains unique and indispensable. He shows how Adorno’s work on aesthetics performs deconstructive operations yet is in sharp distinction to the now canonical deconstructive genre of writing. He explores the complexity of Adorno’s very timely affirmation of philosophy — of its possibility after the “end” of grand theory. Above all, he illuminates the subtlety and richness of Adorno’s continuing emphasis on late capitalism as a totality within the very forms of our culture. In its lucidity, Late Marxism echoes the writing of its subject, to whose critical, utopian intelligence Jameson remains faithful.
