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Fredric Jameson (b. April 14, 1934) is a Marxist political and literary critic and theorist. He is best known for his 1991 Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which critically theorised postmodernism as the claudication of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism, exemplifying his extensive use of critical appraisal of contemporary thought currents to introduce his own reflections. He currently holds the William A. Lane Chair of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University.
Life
Jameson was born in Cleveland, Ohio. After graduating from Haverford College in 1954, he briefly travelled to Europe, studying at Aix, Munich and Berlin. He returned to America the following year to pursue a doctoral degree at Yale, where he studied under Erich Auerbach. Auerbach would prove to be a lasting influence in Jameson's thought, a fact already apparent in his doctoral dissertation, which would later be published as Sartre: the Origins of a Style.
Auerbach's concern with the historical understanding of the interrelatedness of poetry, history, philology, and philosophy was expressed here in a piercing analysis of the correlation between Sartrean stylistic and narrative structures and his political and ethical positions. The Marxian aspects of Sartre's work — which are, in any case, largely extraneous to the main current of his thought — would remain unexplored until the following decade. The spirit of his dissertation, in line with a long tradition of European cultural analysis, was nevertheless set markedly apart from the empiricist and logical positivist trends in philosophy and linguistics dominant in Anglo-Saxon academia.
After receiving his doctorate, Jameson taught at Harvard; his interest in Sarte led him to intense study of Marxist literary theory, which was by then largely unknown in America. This shift was undoubtedly connected with his increasing vinculation with the radical left and pacifist movements; the figures he concentrated on — Lukács, Bloch, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse and Sartre — were representative of the most intensely critical side of Marxist theory, one closely engaged with the Hegelian concept of immanent critique. Simultaneously, he studied what was taking shape in Europe as the main alternative to Marxist analysis, structuralist theories of language and literature. After moving to University of California at San Diego in 1967, these studies resulted in the publication of Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971), and The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972 ). These books employed the self-reflective, totalizing (though antimetaphysical) impulse of neo-Hegelian culture theories to critique both the detached humanism of American scholars and the anti-historical formalism derived from a restrictive interpretation of structuralist method, and called for a form of literary criticism critically engaged with contemporary reality.
Jameson's work during the seventies pursued this path, combining a multi-layered appraisal of literary texts — including genres and authors intensely modern but then scarcely treated by academic studies, such as science fiction or Raymond Chandler — with theoretical incursions on ideology, modernism and literary history. The matter of history played an increasingly central role in the interpretation of both the reading (consumption) and writing (production) of the text. The publication of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) marked his full-fledged commitment to a Hegelian-Marxist framework, even if at the core of its embracing of history as the focal point of literary and cultural analysis it employed notions derived from the structuralist tradition and from Raymond William's work on the diachronism of cultural influences.
Rather than developing new notions for the analysis of literature, The Political Unconscious set out to rigorously ascertain the relation that the well-known historical circumstances of a text — as an historical artifact — bear to its content. Jameson exploited both the explicit formal and thematical choices and the unconscious background guiding these in an attempt to develop a systematic inventory of the modes of subjectivity through the aesthetic selections they impose. The establishment of history as the key factor in this analysis, deriving trascendental cathegories from their historical framework, was paired with a bold theoretical claim to establish Marxian literary criticism as the most all-inclusive and comprehensive theoretical framework, centered in the notion of artistic mode of production.
The groundwork laid out in this book would serve as a basis for Jameson's best-known work, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, published in New Left Review in 1984 during his tenure as Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The controversial article, which would later be expanded to a full-sized book, was part of a series of analyses of postmodernism from the dialectical point of view had developed on narrative phenomena. Postmodern skepticism towards metanarratives was viewed here as a mode of experience determined by the conditions of intellectual labor imposed by the late capitalist mode of production. The dedifferentiation typical of postmodern thought — where the critique of foundationalism was interpreted not as a dialectical refinement of primitive empiricism, but as the merging back of all discourse forms into an undifferentiated status — was seen as the colonization of the cultural sphere by organized capitalism, in the line of Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the Culture Industry. Jameson pursued concrete analyses of this phenomenon in architecture, film, narrative and visual arts, as well as in strictly philosophical grounds.
While Jameson's analysis of postmodernism attempted to analyse it from a historically grounded point of view explictly entailed a rejection of moralistic oppositions to postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon, his analytic take was perceived by many as en endorsement of postmodern views. Some of Jameson's familiar Marxist and Hegelian themes seemed to have been displaced by a postmodern turn. Jameson's further work dispelled this perception, turning to Adorno again in search of a contemporary impulse for Marxian dialectics, and supplementing his critique of postmodernism with additional material, appearing first in a casebook compiled by Douglas Kellner in 1989 under the title Postmodernism/Jameson, Critique and then in the extended version of the 1984 article, published in book form in 1991. This last work earned him the MLA Lowell Award.
During the 90's Jameson further developed this line of thought in the 1994 Seeds of Time, presenting his Wellek Library lectures at the University of California, and the 1998 Brecht and Method, an atypically dispassionate analysis of the political and social context surrouding Brecht's political commitment.
External Links
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