Phillip E. Wegner

Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative

For a half century, the American intellectual Fredric Jameson has been a driving force in literary and cultural theory. In Periodizing Jameson , Phillip E. Wegner builds upon Jamesons unique dialectical method to demonstrate the value of Jamesons tools--periodization, the fourfold hermeneutic, and the Greimasian semiotic square, among others--and to develop virtuoso readings of Jamesons own work and the history of the contemporary American university in which it unfolds. Wegner shows how Jamesons work intervenes in particular social, cultural, and political situations, using his scholarship both to develop original explorations of nineteenth-century fiction, popular films, and other prominent theorists, and to examine the changing fortunes of theory itself. In this way, Periodizing Jameson casts new light on the potential of and challenges to humanist intellectual work in the present.

Jameson's Modernisms; or, the Desire Called Utopia

This essay offers an immanent reading of Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future (2005) in terms of his theorization of a four-fold allegorical hermeneutic. On the literal level, the book explores science fictions; on the allegorical, Utopian representations; on the moral, or individual psychological, it serves as a “partial summing up” of a number of sequences in Jameson’s ongoing project; and on the anagogical, it contributes to a reinvention of Marxism for an era of globalization. Jameson’s recent writings also share an interest in modernism, challenging late modernist ideology and recovering more radical forms. The essay concludes by exploring how Jameson’s discussion of Utopia serves as a figure for the problems of radical politics in the present.

Detonating New Shockwaves of Possibility: Alternate Histories and the Geopolitical Aesthetics of Ken MacLeod and Iain M. Banks

Thiswoman fromOslohadonanenormousdress dotted all overwithpockets. She would pull slips of paper out of her pockets one by one, each with its story to tell, stories tried and true of peoplewhowished to comeback to life through witchcraft. And so she raised the dead and the forgotten, and from the depths of her dress sprang the odysseys and loves of the human animal who goes on living, who goes on speaking. —Eduardo Galeano, El libro de los abrazos [The Book of Embraces] (1989/ 1991)

Lacan avec Greimas: Formalization, Theory, and the "Other Side" of the Study of Culture

I reflect upon the value of Jacques Lacan’s 1969–70 Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, for thinking about the challenges we face as scholars and teachers working in the contemporary university. As with Lacan’s title for this seminar, my title has a range of meanings: I am interested in the way in which “cultural studies” has come to be demonized as the other side of a proper scholarship that fantasizes about a return to respectable normative disciplinarity and in the way in which what Lacan theorizes and performs in this seminar — the work of what he calls analysis — offers an exemplary case of an other side to the study of culture that is the verso of both proper disciplined intellectual labors and the imaginary Other of cultural studies. Lacan was long interested in the productive possibilities of mathematical formalizations. I argue that it is precisely in such formalizations that the heuristic force of what we call theory lies: these formalizations are what “force,” in Alain Badiou’s sense, new knowledges, something I will show in what follows by both outlining some of Lacan’s formalizations and offering a few of my own. Furthermore, in the second half of this essay, I suggest that we might in turn use another formalization, that of A. J. Greimas’s semiotic rectangle, to understand a movement that occurs in Lacan’s work from the three that dominated his earlier “structuralist” thinking — prominently on display in his early 1950s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”— to the four of his late work. Reading Lacan with Greimas helps us understand better both what is imagined and what is really at stake in current debates over theory and scholarship in the humanities.

The Event of 1907; or, James Joyce, Artist

In the history of modernism, the year 1907, like 1922, represents an underappreciated annus mirabilis, a year of miracles. Among the many artistic events to occur that year, perhaps none is more significant than James Joyces completion of what would become the final story in Dubliners (1914) and a work Richard Ellmann describes as ‘his first song of exile’, ‘The Dead’. ‘The Dead’ achieves the indispensable breakthrough of bringing to a close Joyces initial project and inaugurates an unparalleled process of experimentation and invention that will extend through the rest of his career. At the heart of Joyces experiment stands the figure of Gabriel Conroy, the storys prosperous and self-satisfied protagonist. Joyce diagnoses Gabriels condition, and by extension that of all of Irelands middle class at this crucial historical juncture, by staging a series of encounters that bear out Gabriels failure to become a subject in all four of what Alain Badiou terms the conditions of truth—love, politics, scienc...

The Great Sea Voyage Which Marriage Can Be: Repetition, Love, and Concrete Utopia in 50 First Dates

This essay takes up the challenge, issued by Fredric Jameson in a 1976 minnesota review essay, to become attentive to the “presence of some Utopian content even within the most degraded and degrading type of commercial product.” It does so through a reading of the Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore film 50 First Dates (2004) as an example of the utopian film genre that Stanley Cavell identifies as “the comedy of remarriage.” It further draws upon the insights of Alain Badiou to theorize a larger schema of related practices that I name the “evental genres” before exploring in some detail how the deep fidelity practiced by the central couple in the film—most powerfully on display in its unexpected climax—develops a concrete figure of the dayby-day labors, the unending process of remaking, renewal, and reinvention required in any authentic marriage and hence any truly utopian project.

The Possibilities of the Novel: A Look Back on the James-Wells Debate

This essay examines the extended debate between Henry James and H. G. Wells through the lens of Fredric Jameson’s voluminous writings on literature, the novel, and narrative more generally. Reading the exchange in terms other than those of a dominant ethical ideology casts new light on the very different projects executed on each side of the divide: the divide between James and Wells but also, as James Woods’s recent review of David Mitchell’s fiction makes evident, between what remains a still active distinction between the novel and storytelling, “high” and “low” fiction, and, ultimately, art and culture.

The Ends of Culture; or, Late Modernism, Redux

This essay takes up what might appear at first glance to be a quite disparate group of texts, first published over the course of more than half a century and dealing with a range of different media: Theodor Adorno’s World War II–era interventions, Minima Moralia (1951) and Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), the latter coauthored with Max Horkheimer; Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York (1978); Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (1983); Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1996); and the Tim Robbins directed film The Cradle will Rock (1999). What unifies these texts are the insights each provides into the cultural formation Fredric Jameson names “late modernism,” a kind of black box mediator out of which ultimately will emerge both the 1960s countercultures and a later postmodernism. However, more than just shedding light upon a crucial moment of US and global cultural history—roughly, to draw upon the periodization offered by Guilbaut, the years between 1935 and 1948—these works raise an additional question: What is the value of returning to the historical formation of “late modernism” once again in our postcontemporary present?

The Beat Cops of History; or, The Paranoid Style in American Intellectual Politics

I take as my starting point in this paper the fact that the present moment has witnessed a resurgence of the production of the privileged socio-political genre of paranoia, the conspiracy narrative. From recent high profile films such as the remake of the Cold War classic, The Manchurian Candidate (2004), The Constant Gardener (2005), Syriana (2005), State of Play (2009), Watchmen (2009), and the adaptation of one of the most widely read popular conspiracy narratives of all time, The Da Vinci Code (2006) (a film about which I’ll have a few things to say in the final section of this paper), to the collective project of organizations such as Scholars for 9/11 Truth and David Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom, the conspiracy narrative has become once again a prominent aspect of contemporary American culture. There are a number of factors that could account for this rise in conspiracy visions—the violences of corporate globalization; the events of September 11, 2001; the emergence of the new security state; the documented activities of the Bush administration; and the general climate of fear, suspicion, and paranoia accompanying the global War on Terror, first envisioned and brought into being by prominent members