Fredric Jameson

The postmodern condition : a report on knowledge

Many definitions of postmodernism focus on its nature as the aftermath of the modern industrial age when technology developed. This book extends that analysis to postmodernism by looking at the status of science, technology, and the arts, the significance of technocracy, and the way the flow of information is controlled in the Western world.

The Cultures of Globalization

A pervasive force that evades easy analysis, globalization has come to represent the export and import of culture, the speed and intensity of which has increased to unprecedented levels in recent years. The Cultures of Globalization presents an international panel of intellectuals who consider the process of globalization as it concerns the transformation of the economic into the cultural and vice versa; the rise of consumer culture around the world; the production and cancellation of forms of subjectivity; and the challenges it presents to national identity, local culture, and traditional forms of everyday life. Discussing overlapping themes of transnational consequence, the contributors to this volume describe how the global character of technology, communication networks, consumer culture, intellectual discourse, the arts, and mass entertainment have all been affected by recent worldwide trends. Appropriate to such diversity of material, the authors approach their topics from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including those of linguistics, sociology, economics, anthropology, and the law. Essays examine such topics as free trade, capitalism, the North and South, Eurocentrism, language migration, art and cinema, social fragmentation, sovereignty and nationhood, higher education, environmental justice, wealth and poverty, transnational corporations, and global culture. Bridging the spheres of economic, political, and cultural inquiry, The Cultures of Globalization offers crucial insights into many of the most significant changes occurring in today’s world. Contributors . Noam Chomsky, Ioan Davies, Manthia Diawara, Enrique Dussel, David Harvey, Sherif Hetata, Fredric Jameson, Geeta Kapur, Liu Kang, Joan Martinez-Alier, Masao Miyoshi, Walter D. Mignolo, Alberto Moreiras, Paik Nak-chung, Leslie Sklair, Subramani, Barbara Trent

Marxism and form : twentieth-century dialectical theories of literature

For more than thirty years, Fredric Jameson has been one of the most productive, wide-ranging, and distinctive literary theorists in the United States and the Anglophone world. Marxism and Form provided a pioneering account of the work of the major European Marxist theorists--T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, and Jean-Paul Sartre--work that was, at the time, largely neglected in the English-speaking world. Through penetrating readings of each theorist, Jameson developed a critical mode of engagement that has had tremendous in.uence. He provided a framework for analyzing the connection between art and the historical circumstances of its making--in particular, how cultural artifacts distort, repress, or transform their circumstances through the abstractions of aesthetic form. Jamesons presentation of the critical thought of this Hegelian Marxism provided a stark alternative to the Anglo-American tradition of empiricism and humanism. It would later provide a compelling alternative to poststructuralism and deconstruction as they became dominant methodologies in aesthetic criticism. One year after Marxism and Form, Princeton published Jamesons The Prison-House of Language (1972), which provided a thorough historical and philosophical description of formalism and structuralism. Both books remain central to Jamesons main intellectual legacy: describing and extending a tradition of Western Marxism in cultural theory and literary interpretation.

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act

In this ground-breaking and influential study Fredric Jameson explores the complex place and function of literature within culture. At the time Jameson was actually writing the book, in the mid to late seventies, there was a major reaction against deconstruction and poststructuralism. As one of the most significant literary theorists, Jameson found himself in the unenviable position of wanting to defend his intellectual past yet keep an eye on the future. With this book he carried it off beautifully. A landmark publication, The Political Unconscious takes its place as one of the most meaningful works of the twentieth century.century.

The End of Temporality

After the end of history, what? No further beginnings being foreseen, it can only be the end of something else. But modernism already ended some time ago and with it, presumably, time itself, as it was widely rumored that space was supposed to replace time in the general ontological scheme of things. At the very least, time had become a nonperson and people stopped writing about it. The novelists and poets gave it up under the entirely plausible assumption that it had been largely covered by Proust,Mann,Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot and offered few further chances of literary advancement. The philosophers also dropped it on the grounds that althoughBergson remained a dead letter, Heidegger was still publishing a posthumous volume a year on the topic. And as for themountain of secondary literature in both disciplines, to scale it once again seemed a rather old-fashioned thing to do with your life.Was aber war die Zeit?

The Politics of Liberal Education

Controversy over what role “the great books” should play in college curricula and questions about who defines “the literary canon” are at the forefront of debates in higher education. The Politics of Liberal Education enters this discussion with a sophisticated defense of educational reform in response to attacks by academic traditionalists. The authors here—themselves distinguished scholars and educators—share the belief that American schools, colleges, and universities can do a far better job of educating the nation’s increasingly diverse population and that the liberal arts must play a central role in providing students with the resources they need to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world. Within this area of consensus, however, the contributors display a wide range of approaches, illuminating the issues from the perspectives of their particular disciplines—classics, education, English, history, and philosophy, among others—and their individual experiences as teachers. Among the topics they discuss are canon-formation in the ancient world, the idea of a “common culture,” and the educational implications of such social movements as feminism, technological changes including computers and television, and intellectual developments such as “theory.” Readers interested in the controversies over American education will find this volume an informed alternative to sensationalized treatments of these issues. Contributors. Stanley Fish, Phyllis Franklin, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Henry A. Giroux, Darryl J. Gless, Gerald Graff, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, George A. Kennedy, Bruce Kuklick, Richard A. Lanham, Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, Alexander Nehamas, Mary Louise Pratt, Richard Rorty, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

On Goffman's frame analysis

Though betraying traces of the Hauptwerk-prolonged gestation period, wideranging secondary references from linguistics to theatrical history, a voluminous file of clippings poured in pell-mell-Frame A nalysis may also be regarded as yet another version, albeit a vastly distended one, of that peculiar monographic form which is Goffmans invention and to which we return below. It is in any case further testimony to the increasing rapprochement between ethnomethodology and semiotics, a development which may seem healthier for the latter, where it means liberation from a narrow dependence on linguistics, than for ethnomethodology, where, as we shall see in the present case, it suggests the spell of some distant and unattainable formalization, and is accompanied by a decided shift in emphasis from the content of social events and social phenomena to their form, from the concrete meanings of the raw material in question to the way in which they mean and ultimately to the nature of social meaning in general.

The Dialectics of Disaster

Looking back at September  discloses a dissociation of sensibility, in which on the one hand we remember unrealistic visuals, of a special effects or computer graphics type, showing airplanes striking tall and massive edifices, and on the other we recall an amalgamation of media sentiment and emotion, which it would be inexact to call hysterical, since even this hysteria struck many of us, from the outset, as being utterly insincere. To get at the real historical event itself, you feel, one would have to strip away all the emotional reaction to it. But even to get at that emotional reaction, one would have to make one’s way through its media orchestration and amplification. People don’t appreciate a theoretical discussion of their emotions (Are you questioning the sincerity of my feelings?). I suppose the answer has to be, No, not the sincerity of your feelings; rather, the sincerity of all feelings. There is a famous moment in Proust when the narrator, seeking to enhance the grief he feels at his grandmother’s death, suddenly finds he feels nothing at all: the famous ‘‘intermittencies of the heart,’’ which the existentialists dramatized by asserting that, whatever the feeling in question

Sartre : the origins of a style

First published in 1961, Sartre: The Origins of a Style is a striking attempt not merely to analyze Sartres work formally, from an aesthetic perspective but above all to replace Sartre in literary history itself. As a study of Sartres writings this work articulates the antagonism between the modernist tradition and Sartrean narrative or stylistic procedures. From the broader methodological perspective, Jameson turns around the relationship between narrative and narrative closure, the possibility of storytelling, and the kinds of experience-- social and existential--structurally available in a given social formation.

Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory

The notion of an end of theory has been accompanied by announcements of the end of all kinds of other things, which have not been particularly accurate. Let me begin by outlining my conception of what theory is. I believe that theory begins to supplant philosophy (andotherdisciplines as well) at the moment it is realized that thought is linguistic or material and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression. That is something like a philosophical “heresy of paraphrase,” and it atonce excludes and forestalls a great deal of philosophical and systematic writing organized around systems or intentions, meanings and criteria of truth and falsity. Now critique becomes a critique of language and its formulations, that is to say, an exploration of the ideological connotations of various formulations, the long shadow cast by certain words and terms, the questionable worldviews generated by the most impeccable definitions, the ideologies seeping out of seemingly airtight propositions, themoist footprints of error left by the most cautious movements of righteous arguments. This is to say that theory—as the coming to terms with materialist language— will involve something like a language police, an implacable search and destroy mission targeting the inevitable ideological implications of our language practices; it remains only to say that for theory all uses of language, including its own, are susceptible to these slippages and oilspills because there is no longer any correct way of saying it, and all truths are at best momentary, situational, and marked by a history in the process of change and transformation. Youwill already have recognized deconstruction inmy description, and some will wish to associate Althusserianismwith it aswell. We can indeed formulate something like an aesthetic of such writing (provided aesthetic is understood as a rigorous canon of taboos and conven-