For decades now, scholars have described Fredric Jameson as one of the worldâs leading cultural theorists. Sean Homer and Douglas Kellner go as far as to label him âthe most important cultural critic writing today, the worldâs major exponent of Critical Theory and the theorist of postmodernityâ [1, p. xiii]. Despite the grand nature of this claim, it is a difficult one to quarrel with. Two of Jamesonâs booksâMarxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971) and The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981)âare landmark texts in the field of critical theory. Both made major contributions to the revival of Marxist theory within scholarly practice, particularly in the United States. The model for interpretation outlined in The Political Unconscious is a project of rare proportions and has become a primary example of the âsymptomaticâ reading practices that developed in the humanities across the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, Jamesonâs essays on postmodernity and postmodern cultural material published in the 1980sâleading to the book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)âhave become the standard point of engagement for many enquiries into the period. These various aspects of Jamesonâs career have seen his work attain a significance seldom matched in contemporary criticism.
At the same time, several factors offset this towering sense of Jamesonâs status. In several areas of study, such as affect theory and postcolonial studies, critics have consistently written against his work. In this manner, Jameson has often failed to infiltrate or shape the direction of academic thought, despite his well-noted influence. More recently, scholars have claimed that his major interventions within critical theory have come to ossify interpretive practice in certain ways. For example, over the last decade or so work on postmodern literature by Daniel Grausam, Amy Hungerford and Timothy Parrish has frequently defined its methods in contrast to Jamesonian types of analysis. Meanwhile, the sheer visibility of Jamesonâs most famous texts has tended to overshadow other facets of his work. In books and essays that look closely at Jamesonâsuch as Sean Homerâs Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism (2004) and Ian Buchananâs Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (2006)âthe focus often remains on The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, despite the wealth of material he has published across his career. This is attributable in part to Jamesonâs more recent tendency to give his books a tighter focus: when compared to the bolder declarations made in The Political Unconscious and elsewhere, his later work has often had a narrower scope and intention. We should note, however, that across these later texts, Jameson has continued to redefine his oeuvre. While he only makes glancing references to the critical theory that has emerged in the last two decades, Jameson often speaks indirectly to earlier criticisms and subtly realigns itself with contemporary scholarly practice.
Jamesonâs theoretical frameworks continue to be much more influential and discussed than his readings of particular texts. For example, his extended readings of Joseph Conradâs novelsâwhich take up almost a quarter of The Political Unconsciousâhave not become foundational in the same way that the bookâs model for interpretation has. Perhaps the most discussed of Jamesonâs close readings are contained in his seminal essay âPostmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalismâ (1984), where he discusses the Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles and paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Rene Magritte and Andy Warhol. In this manner, it has often seemed correct to consider Jameson a cultural studies figure, rather than a literary one. Sean Homer echoes several introductory passages when he mentions the âastonishing range of cultural analysesâ Jameson has produced, and the breadth of cultural material he has discussed [2, p. 6]. Nevertheless, scholarly production has rarely concerned itself with this aspect of his career in any sustained manner. In monographs on Jameson, critics have often sought to consider the impact of his work and contextualise his major theoretical interventions within a wider sense of his career. Marxist scholars, such as Mathias Nilges and Cornel West, have understandably focused on Jamesonâs reinterpretations of Hegel, Marx and Georg LukĂĄcs, at the expense of discussing a sense of the literary [3, 4]. In sceptical readings of Jameson (which often engage with his notions of totality and periodisation), critics have also concentrated on his theoretical frameworks.
Nevertheless, several factors emphasise the central significance of literature to Jamesonâs Marxist project. He trained primarily in French literature, and he has worked almost entirely within literature departments throughout his long career. Even in his most theoretically focused texts, such as Marxism and Form, he asserts a commitment to the field of literary studies (see 5, p. xi). Within this framework, despite extensive discussions of poetry, music, architecture and film, the novel has remained primary in his reading practice. My work will contend that Jamesonâs idiosyncratic engagements with the literary canonâas well as his predilections and absences when discussing certain periods and formsâhave an impact on his theoretical frameworks, particularly in his sense of historical change. If we make the concession that gaps are inevitable in any critical practice, several aspects of Jameson project nonetheless bring these questions of canonisation and textual choice to the fore: the immensity of his cultural knowledge and range of reference, his interest in generic boundaries and formulation, and his attempts to totalise and to make dialectic connections between disparate texts. By closely attending to Jamesonâs literary readings, we also gain a new perspective on his overarching theoretical concepts, one that differs from many previous critical engagements. Through this work, this book seeks to articulate the tension between Jamesonâs most influential work and the criticism that has surrounded it, while suggesting ways in which his literary interpretation might remain useful for contemporary reading practices. To recognise the specific nature and extent of Jamesonâs engagement with literary studies, in other words, is not just to provide an account of his own literary criticism, but also to offer an alternative viewpoint of his cultural work as a whole.
Major Contributions: Marxism, Symptomatic Reading and Postmodernism
Biographical information on Jameson is hard to come by. Books focusing on his career have given only summary biographical details before concentrating on his theory and achievements. In the framing of his contributions to theory as paradigmatic or foundational, however, there is often a restricted sense of Jamesonâs connection to wider critical discourse. In some ways, his own publications exacerbate this impression. His major texts often engage specifically with an earlier generation of Marxist critics, with only brief references to contemporary academic discussion. As Geoffrey Galt Harpham notes: âJamesonâs works ⊠seem to issue from a center of consciousness unconnected with ⊠any kind of neighborly community. His first books appeared starkly without dedicatees, and, with the exception of his very first, in which he thanked his dissertation advisor, without the customary list of friends and colleagues and institutions who made it all possibleâ [6, pp. 216â217]. The growing number of scholars mentioning Jameson in their own dedications and acknowledgements counteract this sense of the impersonal. Recently, former students have described Jameson as âa great teacherâ [7, p. xiii], or as a dissertation advisor with a âvoracious interest in everything, keen and attentive guidance, and general good moodâ [8, p. 249]. For the contemporary reader without connections to the Program in Literature at Duke University, however, Jamesonâs position within academic communities and contexts remains somewhat obscured. The summary of his career that follows will aim to place his work amongst the changing academic landscapes in which he has operated.
Jameson was born in Cleveland in 1934, and he attended Haverford College, located just outside of Philadelphia, in the 1950s. He has attributed his interest in continental philosophy and diverse cultural materials to studying in the French department at this stage:
It was a time whenâin the â50sâEnglish departments were not reading anything modern. At my college they didnât even teach Joyce and Ulysses; in French departments we were reading all kinds of new stuffâŠ. I think what I was interested in was the link between literature and philosophy. For me, Sartre was such an exampleâboth a philosopher and literary writer. That seemed to me a much more interesting way of putting together an intellectual field of thought than literary specializations that focus mainly on poetic texts. [9]
After this initial training, Jameson attended Yale, again working in the French department. He would complete his PhD in 1959, with his dissertation concentrating on Jean-Paul Sartre. Jameson would revise the work, publishing it as Sartre: The Origins of a Style in 1961. As Harpham notes, the foreword thanks his dissertation advisor Henri Peyre. Scholars have commented more often on a connection to Erich Auerbach, although Jameson describes him simply as his âteacherâ in an interview with Ian Buchanan [10, p. 123]. In the same discussion, Jameson elaborates on how he thought of his own work in relation to Auerbach, before his thorough exploration of Marxist theory: âInstead of the New Criticism, I was really formed in ⊠philology, in both French and German; style studies as it was called then, the work of people like Auerbach for example ⊠where the relationship of the original text ⊠to movements and historical contexts was a great deal closer ⊠than the purely aesthetic appreciations of most English departmentsâ [10, p. 123]. Origins of a Style is a consideration of Sartreâs literary production, and Jameson sees his fiction in terms of a modernist notion of style. In the text, Jameson claims, âa modern style is somehow in itself intelligible, above and beyond the limited meaning of the book written in itâŠ. Such supplementary attention to style is itself a modern phenomenon: it has nothing to do with the purely rhetorical standards of elegance and epithet-weighing which dominated periods where all writers ⊠owed allegiance to a single type of styleâ [11, p. vii]. While the book has become an outlier in discussions of Jamesonâs career, predominantly due to the lack of a Marxist perspective, the focus on the change from realism to modernism aligns with much of his later work. In an afterword written in 1984 for its second edition, Jameson fluidly reframes his earlier arguments within a more contemporary sense of historical modes and critical theory. He claims the objective of the book was to âreplace Sartre in literary history itselfâ and proceeds to tell the âstory over again in what seems to me today a more satisfactory terminologyâ [11, p. 205]. There has been some work by Sean Homer and others that has pointed to ways in which the text remains important to our understanding of Jamesonâs later output. For Homer, âit was precisely through the encounter with Sartre and the limitations of existential phenomenology that Jameson came to Marxism rather than through any break with Sartrean ideas as suchâ [12, p. 1].
Over the next decade, Jameson...