Jameson, Frederic

Fredric Jameson is generally considered to be one of the foremost contemporary Marxist literary critics writing in English. He has published a wide range of works analyzing literary and cultural texts and developing his own neo-Marxist theoretical position. A prolific writer, he has assimilated an astonishing number of theoretical discourses into his project and has intervened in many contemporary debates while analyzing a diversity of cultural texts, ranging from the novel to video, from architecture to postmodernism.

Born in 1934, Jameson grew up in southern New Jersey and attended Haverford College, where he majored in French. He then went to Yale, where he received a PhD for a dissertation on Jean-Paul Sartre, which became his first book, Sartre: Origin of a Style (1961). After intense study of French literary theory in the 1950s, in the 1960s Jameson began an enduring engagement with Marxian theory. He studied two years in Berlin, where he was deeply influenced by the New Left and antiwar movements. In 1970, he published Marxism and Form, which introduced a tradition of dialectical neo-Marxist literary theory to the English-speaking world. Since articulating and critiquing the structuralist project in The Prison-House of Language (1972), Jameson has concentrated on developing his own literary and cultural theory in works such as Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Studies of Theodor W. Adorno, Late Marxism (1990a) and Brecht and Method (2000) continue his intensive work in Marxist theory and aesthetics, and A Singular Modernity (2002) engages the debates over the postmodern through critical analysis of discourses of modernity and modernism.

Jameson has characteristically appropriated into his theory a wide range of positions, from structuralism to poststructuralism and from psychoanalysis to postmodernism, producing a highly eclectic and original brand of Marxian literary and cultural theory. Marxism remains the master narrative of Jameson's corpus, a theoretical apparatus and method that utilizes a dual hermeneutic of ideology and utopia to criticize the ideological components of cultural texts while setting forth their utopian dimension, and that helps produce criticism of existing society and visions of a better world. Influenced by Marxist theorist Ernst Bloch, Jameson thus has developed a hermeneutical and utopian version of Marxian cultural and social theory.

Dialectical criticism for Jameson involves thinking that reflexively analyzes categories and methods while carrying out concrete analyses and inquiries. Categories articulate historical content and thus must be read in terms of the historical environment out of which they emerge. For Jameson, dialectical criticism thus involves thinking that reflects on categories and procedures while engaging in specific concrete studies; relational and historical thinking, which contextualizes the object of study in its historical environment; utopian thinking, which compares the existing reality with possible alternatives and finds utopian hope in literature, philosophy, and other cultural texts; and totalizing, synthesizing thinking, which provides a systematic framework for cultural studies and a theory of history within which dialectical criticism can operate. All these aspects are operative throughout Jameson's work, the totalizing element coming more prominently (and controversially) to the fore as his work evolved.

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