Fredric Jameson

Proceedings of a symposium, held as a satellite meeting of the Second World Congress of Neuroscience, at the University of Bremen in August 1987. An overview of lesion-induced neural plasticity in such areas as the spinal cord; vertibular, oculomotor, visual, and olfactory systems; the cerebellum; and the cerebral cortex. Many diagrams, charts, and illustrations. Some implications for the general understanding of neural plasticity are discussed. The title essay was published in 1984 in New Left Review, and a number of the other essays presented here also appeared in previous publications, sometimes in an earlier form. Jameson (comparative literature, Duke. ) evaluates the concept of postmodernism and surveys developments in a wide range of fields--market ideology, architecture, painting, installment art, film, video art, literature. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions

Archaeologies of the Future

Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Routledge Classics)

The Political Unconscious

The award-winning author of The Cultural Turn presents a major study of the 19th-century realist novel from a comparative perspective that reviews the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism as demonstrated by the works of such major writers as Zola, Tolstoy and George Eliot.

The Antinomies of Realism

Marxism and Form

Controversial manifesto by acclaimed cultural theorist debated by leading writers Fredric Jameson’s pathbreaking essay “An American Utopia” radically questions standard leftist notions of what constitutes an emancipated society. Advocated here are—among other things—universal conscription, the full acknowledgment of envy and resentment as a fundamental challenge to any communist society, and the acceptance that the division between work and leisure cannot be overcome. To create a new world, we must first change the way we envision the world. Jameson’s text is ideally placed to trigger a debate on the alternatives to global capitalism. In addition to Jameson’s essay, the volume includes responses from philosophers and political and cultural analysts, as well as an epilogue from Jameson himself. Many will be appalled at what they will encounter in these pages—there will be blood! But perhaps one has to spill such (ideological) blood to give the Left a chance. Contributing are Kim Stanley Robinson, Jodi Dean, Saroj Giri, Agon Hamza, Kojin Karatani, Frank Ruda, Alberto Toscano, Kathi Weeks, and Slavoj Žižek.

Dual Power and the Universal Army

An American Utopia

Frederic Jameson has had an immense impact on the way the phenomenon of postmodernism is understood. His pioneering work, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, has been widely acclaimed as the classic analysis of postmodernity, examined with an intellectual courage and skill that dared to interconnect cultural, historical, political, economic and philosophical perspectives. Jameson’s constantly enriched reflections have become an essential reference point for all those attempting to grapple with the postmodern. However, until now, several of his key writings on the subject, from initial formulations to current developments, have been unavailable in an accessible form. This collection vividly illuminates the cultural turn of contemporary capitalism. Thus it includes his earliest insights, his responses to critics, his survey of alternative interpretations and his earliest insights, his responses to critics, his survey of alternative interpretations and his engagement with the cultural climate of the 1990s. The collection, introduced by Perry Anderson, includes a number of recent texts in which Jameson extends his method to new aspects of postmodern architecture and its relationship to political economy. The Cultural Turn is an indispensable guide to the thought of the most arresting and impressive theorist of postmodernism.

Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998

The Cultural Turn

Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. He asserts the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts, claiming it to be at the center of all reading and understanding, not just a supplement or auxiliary to other methods current today. Jameson supports his thesis by looking closely at the nature of interpretation. Our understanding, he says, is colored by the concepts and categories that we inherit from our culture's interpretive tradition and that we use to comprehend what we read. How then can the literature of other ages be understood by readers from a present that is culturally so different from the past? Marxism lies at the foundation of Jameson's answer, because it conceives of history as a single collective narrative that links past and present; Marxist literary criticism reveals the unity of that uninterrupted narrative. Jameson applies his interpretive theory to nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, including the works of Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad. Throughout, he considers other interpretive approaches to the works he discusses, assessing the importance and limitations of methods as different as Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, dialectical analysis, and allegorical readings. The book as a whole raises directly issues that have been only implicit in Jameson's earlier work, namely the relationship between dialectics and structuralism, and the tension between the German and the French aesthetic traditions.

Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

Or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (Radical Thinkers)

Late Marxism: Adorno

Fredric Jameson takes on the allegorical form Works do not have meanings, they soak up meanings: a work is a machine for libidinal investments (including the political kind). It is a process that sorts incommensurabilities and registers contradictions (which is not the same as solving them!) The inevitable and welcome conflict of interpretations - a discursive, ideological struggle - therefore needs to be supplemented by an account of this simultaneous processing of multiple meanings, rather than an abandonment to liberal pluralisms and tolerant (or intolerant) relativisms. This is not a book about "method", but it does propose a dialectic capable of holding together in one breath the heterogeneities that reflect our biological individualities, our submersion in collective history and class struggle, and our alienation to a disembodied new world of information and abstraction. Eschewing the arid secularities of philosophy, Walter Benjamin once recommended the alternative of the rich figurality of an older theology; in that spirit we here return to the antiquated Ptolemaic systems of ancient allegory and its multiple levels (a proposal first sketched out in The Political Unconscious); it is tested against the epic complexities of the overtly allegorical works of Dante, Spenser and the Goethe of Faust II, as well as symphonic form in music, and the structure of the novel, postmodern as well as Third-World: about which a notorious essay on National Allegory is here reprinted with a theoretical commentary; and an allegorical history of emotion is meanwhile rehearsed from its contemporary, geopolitical context.

Allegory and Ideology

Fredric Jameson's survey of Structuralism and Russian Formalism is, at the same time, a critique of their basic methodology. He lays bare the presuppositions of the two movements, clarifying the relationship between the synchronic methods of Saussurean linguistics and the realities of time and history.

A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism

The Prison-house of Language

Valences of the dialectic

Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

One of the most accomplished literary and cultural critics in the world, Fredric Jameson returns to the philosophy of the dialectic in a grand and nuanced study of the concept and those who have developed it. The question of the dialectic remains at the center of contemporary theoretical debates: Is it Hegelian and idealistic? To what degree is it central to Marxism? Is a materialist dialectic really possible? How damaging are the “poststructuralist” critiques of the dialectic by Deleuze, and Laclau and Mouffe? Valences of the Dialectic addresses these questions, and studies individual thinkers both dialectical and anti-dialectical, from Hegel and Fichte to Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Deleuze and Lacan.

Valences of the Dialectic

Jürgen Habermas

Edward W. Said

Rosalind Krauss

Kenneth Frampton

Craig Owens

Gregory L. Ulmer

Essays on Postmodern Culture

The Anti-Aesthetic

Jameson’s first full-length engagement with Walter Benjamin’s work. The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-philosophical, anti-systematic thinker whose conceptual interests also felt the gravitational pull of his vocation as a writer. What resulted was a coexistence or variety of language fields and thematic codes which overlapped and often seemed to contradict each other: a view which will allow us to clarify the much-debated tension in his works between the mystical or theological side of Benjamin and his political or historical inclination. The three-way tug of war over his heritage between adherents of his friends Scholem, Adorno and Brecht, can also be better grasped from this position, which gives the Brechtian standpoint more due than most influential academic studies. Benjamin’s corpus is an anticipation of contemporary theory in the priority it gives language and representation over philosophical or conceptual unity; and its political motivations are clarified by attention to the omnipresence of History throughout his writing, from the shortest articles to the most ambitious projects. His explicit program—“to transfer the crisis into the heart of language” or, in other words, to detect class struggle at work in the most minute literary phenomena—requires the reader to translate the linguistic or representational literary issues that concerned him back into the omnipresent but often only implicitly political ones. But the latter are those of another era, to which we must gain access, to use one of Benjamin’s favorite expressions.

The Benjamin Files

"The visual is essentially pornographic," writes Fredric Jameson, "films ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body." In Signatures of the Visible, one of America's most influential critics explores film and the culture surrounding it, interrogating the relationship between the imaginative screen world and the historical world onto which it is projected. By seeking the historical dimension of the visual, Jameson evaluates the power of the filmic form as a vehicle for the critique of culture and the diagnosis of social life. Jameson pursues this investigation through readings of politics, class, allegory, magic realism, and "the historical" in such films as Diva, The Shining, and Dog Day Afternoon. Throughout the book, he is concerned with the relationship between the achievements and limits of contemporary film theory itself, "a relationship," he argues, "which allows one to take the temperature of history itself."

Signatures of the Visible

A persuasive theorist of postmodernity presents writings that "sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction" (Terry Eagleton).

Essay on the Ontology of the Present

A Singular Modernity

Fredric Jameson, a leading voice on the subject of postmodernism, assembles his most powerful writings on the culture of late capitalism in this essential volume. Classic insights on pastiche, nostalgia, and architecture stand alongside essays on the status of history, theory, Marxism, and the subject in an age propelled by finance capital and endless spectacle. Surveying the debates that blazed up around his earlier essays, Jameson responds to critics and maps out the theoretical positions of postmodernism’s prominent friends and foes.

Fredric Jameson

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