For decades now, scholars have described Fredric Jameson as one of the world’s leading cultural theorists. Sean Homer and Douglas Kellner go as far as to label him “the most important cultural critic writing today, the world’s major exponent of Critical Theory and the theorist of postmodernity” [1, p. xiii]. Despite the grand nature of this claim, it is a difficult one to quarrel with. Two of Jameson’s books—Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971) and The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981)—are 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 “symptomatic” reading practices that developed in the humanities across the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, Jameson’s essays on postmodernity and postmodern cultural material published in the 1980s—leading to the book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)—have become the standard point of engagement for many enquiries into the period. These various aspects of Jameson’s career have seen his work attain a significance seldom matched in contemporary criticism.
At the same time, several factors offset this towering sense of Jameson’s 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 Jameson’s most famous texts has tended to overshadow other facets of his work. In books and essays that look closely at Jameson—such as Sean Homer’s Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism (2004) and Ian Buchanan’s Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (2006)—the 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 Jameson’s 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.
Jameson’s theoretical frameworks continue to be much more influential and discussed than his readings of particular texts. For example, his extended readings of Joseph Conrad’s novels—which take up almost a quarter of The Political Unconscious—have not become foundational in the same way that the book’s model for interpretation has. Perhaps the most discussed of Jameson’s close readings are contained in his seminal essay “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (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 “astonishing range of cultural analyses” 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 Jameson’s reinterpretations of Hegel, Marx and Georg Lukács, 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 Jameson’s 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 Jameson’s idiosyncratic engagements with the literary canon—as well as his predilections and absences when discussing certain periods and forms—have 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 Jameson’s 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 Jameson’s 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 Jameson’s 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 Jameson’s 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: “Jameson’s 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 possible” [6, pp. 216–217]. 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 “a great teacher” [7, p. xiii], or as a dissertation advisor with a “voracious interest in everything, keen and attentive guidance, and general good mood” [8, p. 249]. For the contemporary reader without connections to the Program in Literature at Duke University, however, Jameson’s 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.
It was a time when—in the ‘50s—English departments were not reading anything modern. At my college they didn’t even teach Joyce and Ulysses; in French departments we were reading all kinds of new stuff…. I think what I was interested in was the link between literature and philosophy. For me, Sartre was such an example—both 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 “teacher” 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: “Instead 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 departments” [10, p. 123]. Origins of a Style is a consideration of Sartre’s literary production, and Jameson sees his fiction in terms of a modernist notion of style. In the text, Jameson claims, “a modern style is somehow in itself intelligible, above and beyond the limited meaning of the book written in it…. 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 style” [11, p. vii]. While the book has become an outlier in discussions of Jameson’s 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 “replace Sartre in literary history itself” and proceeds to tell the “story over again in what seems to me today a more satisfactory terminology” [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 Jameson’s later output. For Homer, “it 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 such” [12, p. 1].
Over the next decade, Jameson would be employed at two major North American universities, firstly Harvard and then the University of California, San Diego. He would again work in French and comparative literature departments throughout this period. While continental philosophy had been a major influence on him up to this point, and he had encountered the writing of Georg Lukács as early as 1956 it would be at this stage that Jameson’s published work began to demonstrate a thorough immersion in Western Marxist theory [see 13, pp. 75–76]. Within this time frame, he produced several articles that signified this change of direction. These include “T. W. Adorno, or, Historical Tropes” (1967), “Walter Benjamin, or Nostalgia” (1970), and “The Case for Georg Lukács” (1970). After this run of essays, Jameson published three highly prominent texts across the next three decades: Marxism and Form (1971), The Political Unconscious (1981) and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). While he would generate a wide range of material in essays, books and collections across this period, critics have often summarised Jameson’s career and general influence by looking at these three works in particular.
Marxism and Form is a thoroughgoing reappraisal of the work of key Western Marxists. In the text, Jameson argues for the importance of figures such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Lukács and Sartre to the field of literary theory. Here, Jameson traces an intellectual tradition largely ignored in the English-speaking world at the time of its publication, particularly within the United States. He describes the academic landscape at the time as such: “Marxist criticism has begun to make its presence felt upon the English-language horizon. This is what may be called … a relatively Hegelian kind of Marxism, which for the German countries may be traced back to Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness … while in France it may be … dated from the Hegel revival there during the … thirties” [5, p. ix]. While at this stage of his career he does not often reference New Criticism overtly, Jameson does reserve his harshest criticism for certain aspects of US academic practice, particularly “that mixture of political liberalism, empiricism, and logical positivism which we know as Anglo-American philosophy…. The bankruptcy of the liberal tradition is as plain on the philosophical level as it is on the political” [5, p. x]. For Jameson this bankruptcy is based in “The anti-speculative bias of that tradition, its emphasis on the individual fact or item at the expense of the network of relationships in which that item may be embedded” [5, p. x]. In Marxism and Form, Jameson points to the increased attention that both English and North American universities were beginning to pay to French and German Marxist theorists of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, he is quick to remind the reader of the far more dominant tradition in North American academia, and he laments the lack of translations of key texts by Bloch, Lukács and others. His intervention is largely implicit, however, and he seldom mentions particular North American critics or schools of thought by name. Additionally, his survey of Western Marxists looks predominantly at work published before the late 1950s, and thus Jameson effectively negates a developed sense of contemporary engagement.
If … we set aside that part of Lukács’ work which constitutes a set of recommendations to the artist … we find that his analysis of modernism is based on a fundamental fact of modern art: namely, the observation of … an absolute difference between that literature which is ours, and which begun around the time of Baudelaire and Flaubert, and the classical literature that preceded it…. The advantage of Lukács over sympathetic theoreticians of the modern lies in the differentiating and profoundly comparative thought mode which is his. He is not inside the modern phenomenon. [5, pp. 198–199]
Jameson finishes the book by touching on some of the major theoretical ideas he will develop in later works: a return to dialectical criticism, his Marxist vision of the postmodern and a model for interpretation that seeks to uncover the politically repressed in terms of class struggles and oppression.
Reviews of Marxism and Form reveal the singularity of Jameson’s work in the US academy at this stage. Ehrhard Bahr calls it “the most informative and lucid introduction to modern Marxist literary criticism which … exists today in the English language” [14, p. 180]. He also claims “no comparatist concerned with literary theory and criticism can afford to overlook this work” [14, p. 182]. Paul Piccone and Heinz D. Osterle similarly praised the originality of Jameson’s project in published reviews, but critics such as Israel Gerver are more suggestive of the resistance that Marxist theory faced in this period. Writing from a sociology perspective, Gerver finds “the insistence on the validity and respectability of Marxism as an intellectual mode is too shrill, and despite Jameson’s sophistication, his is an ultimately unsatisfying formulation of the sociology of literature” [15, p. 654]. In his conclusion, Gerver sceptically claims, “Others may feel that the weightiness of the Marxian framework lends significance to what most American sociologists regard as intellectually marginal” [15, p. 654]. Still, Marxism and Form stands as a ground-breaking text. Its publication signifies the beginning of an extensive incorporation of Marxist theory within North American criticism over the next three decades. The book raised Jameson’s profile substantially, in conjunction with another seminal essay, “Metacommentary” (1971). The article was published in PLMA, and—along with another contribution to the journal, “La Cousine Bette and Allegorical Realism” (1971)—it went on to win the William Riley Parker Prize of that year, awarded by the Modern Language Association. Jameson would publish his next major text, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972), soon after. With this body of work, he quickly established himself as a significant voice in critical theory at the time.
A decade later, The Political Unconscious would eclipse this early success substantially. While Marxism and Form remains a key text for dedicated Marxist scholars and readers of Jameson, The Political Unconscious has had a wider impact on literary and cultural studies. With this publication, Jameson moved beyond predominantly reframing the historical reception of major theorists—as seen in both Marxism and Form and The Prison-House of Language—and began his own polemic work in earnest. In The Political Unconscious, he argues for “the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts” [16, p. 17]. He claims this intervention takes place in an environment where it is “increasingly clear that hermeneutic or interpretive activity has become one of the basic polemic targets of contemporary post-structuralism in France” [16, p. 21]. In the decade following Marxism and Form, the target of Jameson’s critique had shifted, with New Criticism giving way to poststructuralist and psychoanalytic reading practices in North American universities. He argues against the anti-interpretive tendencies found in the theory of Jacques Derrida and Susan Sontag in particular, while also working to problematise texts such as Roland Barthes’ S/Z (1970). For Jameson, the historical, cultural and political are inextricably linked. He claims cultural senses of the signifier and signified are historically marked, and that Barthes’ perspective differs from that of the Balzac story he reads in S/Z. As Jameson argues in “Metacommentary”, critics must acknowledge these differing historical positions. Furthermore, he states that no anti-interpretive act can escape hermeneutics entirely: “The ideal of an immanent analysis of a text, of a dismantling or deconstruction of its parts and a description of its functioning and malfunctioning amounts less to a wholesale nullification of all interpretive activity than to a demand for the construction of some new and more adequate, immanent or antitranscendent hermeneutic model” [16, p. 23]. With the extended opening chapter of The Political Unconscious, Jameson attempts to provide such a model. In doing so, he allows for the kind of “difference, flux, dissemination, and heterogeneity” argued for by Gilles Deleuze or Derrida, but he reasserts the importance of Marxist readings that speak to the social, political and historical [16, p. 23]. To do this, Jameson labours to reframe a number of Marxist concepts—such as mediation, totality, superstructure and mode of production—throughout the text. Importantly, he concedes that history “is fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational” [16, p. 82]. He will seek to move beyond this particular impasse, however, when he claims “history is inaccessible to us except in textual form, or in other words, that it can be approached only by way of prior (re)textualization” [16, p. 82]. For Jameson, the primacy of narrative in conceptions of history and the world at large is not binding theoretically; rather, it must be a consideration of any reading practice. Here, even as Jameson aligns himself with a poststructuralist attention to difference, he aims to subsume these theoretical standpoints into his Marxist project. His goal is always explicitly to reassert the presence of class struggle, false ideology, reification and modes of production within these varying frameworks.
For Jameson, while history remains a heterogeneous mass, it is also the widest horizon to which interpretation and culture can speak. To work towards this horizon, Jameson argues the critic must begin with a structural analysis, borrowing from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ readings of myth, but also invested in the Lacanian notion of the symbolic. From there, the critic can locate the ideologeme, “the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourse of social classes” [16, p. 76]. Jameson reframes Lévi-Strauss’ sense that “the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real)” [17, p. 229]. In this regard, Jameson claims we can see the “symbolic act” in terms of competing class interests and take textual readings to the level of the social. Within this wider social purview, the critic is to see the text as a singular ideological message operating amongst multitudinous cultural discourses. Jameson then argues that interpretation may subsequently move onto the level of the historical. He thus sees these social forces in terms of modes of production as they evolve throughout history, whether as residual, dominant or emergent—terms he borrows from Raymond Williams. The remainder of The Political Unconscious sees Jameson putting his model to work. In the second chapter, he provides an overview of this method within the context of genre, looking specifically at romantic and melodramatic literary forms. Across the next three chapters, Jameson concentrates on a singular horizon, providing a more developed sense of his reading method. Within this work he also charts a historical progression, with each chapter focusing on a particular author and a subsequent period of the nineteenth century. In this manner, Jameson moves from Honoré de Balzac to George Gissing and then to Joseph Conrad.
Preserving the autonomy of [literary, political and economic] levels does not keep Jameson from affirming the transcendental status of his conceptual terms as well as his interpretive “frameworks.” While the post-structuralist denies that conceptual distinctions transcend the discursive network in which they are formed and embedded, Jameson assumes that theoretical terms like “class,” “value,” or “space” escape their disciplinary contexts and acquire a “transcendent” status allowing them to characterize a whole period or to determine political practices or social institutions. [20, p. 264]
This hesitancy towards Jameson’s interpretive frameworks is a common one and informs criticisms found in postmodernist theory, gender studies and postcolonial criticism, amongst other areas of scholarly production. The critique has persisted throughout Jameson’s career, as we will see below, and the issue will be discussed further in the chapters to follow.
In the same period, Terry Eagleton would begin to write on Jameson, articulating a particular set of enthusiasms and concerns in two essays that remain highly referenced articles within discussions of Jameson’s work. In “The Idealism of American Criticism” (1981), Eagleton claims Jameson’s prose has an “intense libidinal charge, a burnished elegance and unruffled poise, which allows him to sustain a rhetorical lucidity through the most tortuous, intractable materials” [18, pp. 14–15]. Similarly, in “Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style” (1982), Eagleton declares, “for me, it is equally unimaginable that anyone could read Jameson’s own magisterial, busily metaphorical sentences without profound pleasure, and indeed I must acknowledge that I take a book of his from the shelf as often in place of poetry or fiction as of literary theory” [21, pp. 14–15]. Along with these kinds of assessment, however, Eagleton also frequently expresses a reservation about the efficacy of Jameson’s political project. In “The Idealism of American Criticism”, Eagleton famously states, “for the question irresistibly raised for the Marxist reader of Jameson is simply this: how is a Marxist-structuralist analysis of a minor novel of Balzac to help shake the foundations of capitalism?” [18, p. 65]. Another of Jameson’s contemporaries, Edward Said, adds to this discussion of political efficacy. In “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community” (1982), Said considers Jameson’s contribution to Marxist theory, the political possibilities of academic work, as well as Eagleton’s “The Idealism of American Criticism”. For Said, The Political Unconscious is “by any standard a major work of intellectual criticism”, but remains sceptical of its Marxist project [22, p. 146]. Said argues that The Political Unconscious contains an “unadmitted dichotomy between two kinds of ‘Politics’: (1) the politics defined by political theory from Hegel to Louis Althusser and Ernst Bloch; (2) the politics of struggle and power in the everyday world, which in the United States at least has been won, so to speak, by Reagan” [22, p. 147]. For Said, Jameson’s prioritising of political theory effectively means he focuses on the synchronic and teleological over the local, which Said doubts is tenable. Ultimately, Said asks, “how do quotidian politics and the struggle for power enter into the hermeneutic, if not by simple instruction from above or by passive osmosis?” [22, p. 147]. Alongside the claims that Jameson’s work totalises in a problematic fashion, this criticism of political efficacy has also remained a pertinent one across his career.
constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary “theory” and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose “schizophrenic” structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone—what I will call “intensities”—which can be best grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole new technology, which itself is a figure for a whole new economic world system. [23, p. 6]
In the essay, Jameson analyses a variety of cultural materials in terms of the features discussed above, and he discusses a sense of historical, spatial and temporal confusion for the Western postmodern subject. The components that Jameson describes, along with a number of catchphrases associated with this work—“the waning of affect”, “hyperspace”, “the hysterical sublime” and others—remain the more widely quoted elements of his essays on postmodernism. In this manner, his articles have become a primary source for critics referencing certain postmodern sensibilities. For another group of scholars, however, Jameson’s major contribution to postmodern studies remains his work to connect these aesthetic qualities to economic, social and historical change. In this regard, he reminds “the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and terror” [23, p. 5]. The bulk of these essays focus on postmodern temporal and spatial confusion, however, and how this cultural situation is symptomatic of the obfuscation of global connections in a multinational capitalist system.
It is interesting here and elsewhere to observe the ways that Jameson’s effort to synthesize Marxism with poststructuralism and other competing modes of thought are criticized by both sides. Generally, poststructuralists and others claim that Jameson is guilty of excessively totalizing, subjectivizing, historicizing and of utilizing humanist and reductive modes of thought … while Marxist and other critics claim that Jameson goes too far in in the direction of dissolving and fragmenting subjectivity and in accepting postmodernism. [24, p. 39]
For example, in “Marxism and Resistance: Fredric Jameson and the Moment of Postmodernism”, David S. Gross summarises the major theoretical debates that Jameson is engaging with at this stage of his career. Predominantly discussing early postmodern essays such as “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate”, Gross delineates Jameson’s relationship to the liberal pluralism of North American academia in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to poststructuralists in the vein of Michel Foucault and Paul De Man. Gross focuses particularly on Jameson’s attacks on varying kinds of anti-historicist interpretation in both postmodern studies and poststructuralist theory. For Gross, this is the major contribution of Jameson’s postmodern essays. In sketching out the debates to which Jameson responds to, Gross also engages with the controversial role of totality in his frameworks, stating that “the totalizing practice in Jameson’s theory accommodates dialectically heterogeneity and différance (i.e., the rifts, gaps and aporias disclosed by deconstruction), but not at the expense that ‘it’s all connected’” [25, p. 98]. In this manner, Gross argues for the possibility of political agency within Jameson’s theory. We might contrast Gross’ response with Mike Featherstone’s “Postmodernism, Cultural Change, and Social Practice” from the same volume. In the essay, Featherstone is quick to remind the reader that “approaches like those of Jameson tend to regard history as the outcome of a particular relentless developmental logic and play down the role played by classes, social movements and groups in creating the preconditions for such a logic in their various power balances, interdependencies and struggles for hegemony” [26, p. 120]. Even as he recognises the often-raised problem “faced by those such as Lyotard who formulate the postmodern as the end of narratives is that they too require a metanarrative to explain the emergence of the postmodern”, Featherstone remains committed to breaking Jameson’s larger categories into contradictory components [26, p. 118].
Despite these criticisms, Jameson has remained committed to broader interpretations of history and culture in order to argue for the necessity of social change. Considering the type of interpretation recommended in The Political Unconscious, however, his politicised understanding of postmodern cultural production and social reality displays an increased doubt about the possibility of praxis, or for removing oneself from the cognitive dissonance created by late capitalism. This relationship between Western cultural material and the newly developing phase of capitalism—along with an associated alienation and reification—has come to define another kind of response to Jameson’s work on the postmodern. For example, Timothy Parrish describes a landscape in postmodern literary studies, one populated with readings that “helplessly iterate and perpetually enact Jameson’s concern that aesthetic creation and commodity production have become the same thing” [27, p. 646]. For scholarly production invested in postmodern cultural material, Jameson’s influential descriptions of late capitalism are often stifling in their pervasive influence. Within cultural studies, critics discussing the “post-postmodern” have found themselves in a similar position. Scholars such as Christian Moraru, Brian McHale, Robert L. McLaughlin and Jeffrey T. Nealon have remained thoroughly invested in Jameson’s portrayals of postmodernity, despite aiming to come to new and productive understandings of our current historical situation. The sense that a variety of scholars must work out from under Jameson’s articles on postmodernism betrays the enormous influence and visibility of his work in this area. Postmodernism would go on to win the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association in 1991. The original “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” article remains a widely taught and referenced text, even as the differing aspects of Jameson’s project remain in an uneasy state of flux in this reception. It is, by now (to echo Homer and Kellner) the paradigmatic piece of postmodern theory; it eclipses the work by Lyotard and Baudrillard to which it responds. The extent to which we can quantify this article’s contribution to the expansion of cultural studies as a field is perhaps limited, in a way that Marxism and Form’s impact on Marxist theory is not. Nevertheless, its totemic status in this particular moment of critical theory certainly speaks to a sizable influence across a number of areas of academia.
Jameson’s Longue Durée: Minor Works and Contemporary Approaches
While these major texts are the most visible and significant moments in Jameson’s career, this portrayal is complicated by the extensive period he has worked over, the prolific output he has sustained throughout this time, and the variety of cultural materials he has discussed. In publications contemporaneous to his major texts, Jameson expresses a diverse set of interests. This is evident in less-discussed books such as The Prison-House of Language and Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979), and in a broad range of more specialist articles. In these more minor outputs, his focus ranges from Russian Formalism to twentieth-century detective fiction, and he is also less concerned with theoretical frameworks or grand statements. After the publication of Postmodernism, Jameson remained largely interested in postmodernity for the better part of a decade, but his publications in this period also involved the reading of a variety of cultural materials, such as architecture, detective narratives and peripheral global cinemas. As Jameson moved into the new century, his work continued to diversify. He published Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), a lengthy consideration of science fiction in relation to utopian theory, which also collected many of his early articles on the genre. Contemporaneously, he published two books on modernism: A Singular Modernity (2002) and The Modernist Papers (2007), the latter also collecting a broad range of earlier essays. From there, he would publish three texts focused on more theoretical concerns. Valences of the Dialectic (2009), The Hegel Variations (2010) and Representing Capital: A Commentary on Volume One (2011) would consider, respectively, of the history of dialectical theory, Hegel, and Marx. His interest in popular culture would also see Jameson produce articles on the television programme The Wire (2002–2008) and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), amongst other topics.
To this day, critiques of Jameson are overshadowed by his writings on postmodernism leading up to the book of 1991. It can be taken as symptomatic that the most recent book-length engagement with Jameson, Ian Buchanan’s 2006 Fredric Jameson: Live Theory, essentially terminates its discussion of Jameson’s conception of a postmodern present with that volume, as do the introductions to the two essay collections on Jameson to have appeared in this decade. [28, p. 106]
This tendency can be seen in monographs such as Sean Homer’s Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism (1998) and Adam Robert’s Fredric Jameson (2000), alongside Buchanan’s text. These books are also typically sympathetic to their subject and often serve as an introduction to Jameson’s more complex theoretical ideas. Commonly, they see Jameson’s work as having a vast and largely positive influence, and only briefly deal with the major criticisms found in his reception. More recent monographs on Jameson, such as Robert T. Tally Jr.’s Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (2014) and Philip E. Wegner’s Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative (2014), provide more thorough engagements with Jameson’s later work, but remain in a similar mode. As such, these texts do not often point to the somewhat incongruous nature of Jameson’s work, remarked on by commentators such as Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Neil Lazarus and Evan Watkins. For example, Watkins speaks to the monolithic sense of Jameson’s arrival in the world of US academia (with the successive publications of Marxism and Form, The Prison-House of Language and “Metacommentary” over a short period). At the same time, however, Watkins paints Jameson as “somehow already fashionably belated, already [an] immense and impressive monument at which subsequent generations of student tour groups would have to be detained…. His influence has been distanced rather than inaugural like that of Derrida or Foucault” [19, p. 17]. Similarly, Lazarus claims Jameson’s “own interpretation of a particular phenomenon or text or tendency, while being duly and dutifully referenced in the subsequent scholarly literature, has never quite emerged as the representative one, the institutional standard” [29, p. 42]. Indeed, these opposing circumstances often mitigate Jameson’s imposing reputation. While postmodern studies, Marxist theory and literary studies more broadly have seen him as a pivotal figure, this has not always been in a positive manner. Despite the case for Jameson’s influence, rarely has his work become integral to major academic fields such as feminist theory, affect theory and postcolonial studies. Critics often cite his work in a superficial fashion, and elements of his output have long been averse to mainstream critical discourse. Furthermore, while scholars frequently describe Jameson as an eminent figure, tied to important moments in the history of critical theory, increasingly he is also seen as a distant but overbearing figure that needs to be cast off.
The influence of Jameson’s version of symptomatic reading can be felt in the centrality of two scholarly texts from the 1990s: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1991), which crystallized the emergent field of queer theory, and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which set forth an agenda for studying the structuring role of race in American literature. Both showed that one could read a text’s silences, gaps, style, tone, and imagery as symptoms of the queerness or race absent only apparently from its pages. [31, p. 6]
In the context of recent U. S. critical theory … where Marx, Nietzsche and Freud by themselves are taken as constituting a pretty sufficient genealogy for the mainstream of New Historicist, deconstructive, feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic criticism, to apply a hermeneutics of suspicion is, I believe, widely understood as a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities. [32, p. 125]1
Sedgwick also belonged to a group of affect theorists, including Lawrence Grossberg, Brian Massumi and Sianne Ngai, who have frequently criticised Jameson. As this new ambit of scholars has repurposed terminology and theory relation to affect, they have often discussed Jameson’s famous phrase used to describe postmodern subjectivity, that of the “waning of affect”. This work only briefly engages with Jameson, however, and does not often consider his broader discussions of affect found in Postmodernism or elsewhere.
This common focus on either The Political Unconscious or Postmodernism as a point of departure—and the tendency to see the influence of Jameson’s work as restricting new scholarly production in certain ways—is often at the expense of acknowledging how his later production makes many shifts and amendments, or how it reframes many of his previous discussions. We should note that Jameson’s impersonal style often obscures these subtle revisions of his more famous texts. The glancing manner in which he references both contemporary theory and direct criticism also contributes to this situation. Nevertheless, scholars continue to ignore the importance of other interpretive methods to his wider oeuvre. While critics working on Jameson in detail have long accentuated the importance of dialectical thought to his interpretive practice, briefer engagements such as those discussed above often diminish this aspect of his work. A discussion of cognitive mapping is also absent in these wider criticisms of Jameson, a component of his thought that has developed significantly in the last two decades. In “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, he claims “The political form of postmodernism … will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as spatial scale” [23, p. 54]. For Jameson, space becomes the dominate problem of postmodernity—as opposed to the high-modernist focus on problems of time—due to the increasingly global and un-representable scale of multinational capitalist systems. Although he does not see an aesthetic practice of cognitive mapping yet existing, elsewhere his readings of realism, detective fiction, science fiction and certain cinematic examples offer parameters for this kind of operation. As Jameson’s career has progressed, notions of cognitive mapping have increasingly informed many of his readings of cultural material—whether in spatial, historical or conceptual terms. As Robert T. Tally Jr. has claimed, “although one might notice that Jameson never quite wrote a full-scale study of cognitive mapping per se, and that he tended to refrain from using the term itself as the Nineties wore on, the concept or project remained a key aspect of his cultural criticism during this period, and it has done so, arguably, throughout his entire career” [33, p. 100]. This is especially evident in newer material that reads contemporary literature and cinema in terms of an “aesthetic of singularity” [34, p. 304].
Jameson’s most significant publication in the last decade, The Antinomies of Realism (2013), works in this direction. Within the book, he focuses on the nineteenth-century realist novel to a degree not seen since The Political Unconscious, and he reads affect as an emergent category within the literature of the period. While notions of affect appear in several of his earlier essays, the text has an obvious relation to affect theory, a highly discussed area of contemporary scholarly production. Jameson claims, “I do not here mean to appropriate [affect] … nor do I mean to endorse or to correct the philosophies of which it currently constitutes a kind of signal or badge or group identity. Indeed, I want to specify a very local and restricted practical use of the term” [34, pp. 28–29]. Indeed, he only references theorists such as Sedgwick, Sylvan Tompkins and Rei Terada in passing. Jameson instead concentrates on the formal aspects of realism and describes a narrative whereby affect comes to infiltrate a growing number of aspects of the realist novel. At the same time, The Antinomies of Realism participates implicitly in the affect theory discussion, especially when considering Jameson’s history of oblique engagement with contemporary theory. Moreover, the text makes other concessions to the changing landscape of literary studies. Jameson reframes his sense of postmodern temporality by claiming “that the contemporary or postmodern ‘perpetual present’ is better characterized as a ‘reduction to the body,’ inasmuch as the body is all that remains in any tendential reduction of experience to the present as such” [34, p. 28]. He also moves away from the symptomatic style of reading criticised by Marcus, Sedgwick and others. The Antinomies of Realism is one of Jameson’s least politically focused works, with the text’s interest in historical development rarely concerned overtly with the political, paranoid or symptomatic. His oblique engagement with affect theory, his focus on realism and the reframing of his earlier terminology have given this work a renewed prominence after a series of publications with more specialised concerns. The Antinomies of Realism elicited special issues, symposiums and roundtables in response to its publication, and a body of work surrounding the text emerged in rapid fashion [see 35]. While the reception of The Antinomies of Realism denotes an increased impact in comparison with some of his other recent output, we can also see the book as exposing a number of tendencies already present in his work over the last decade—ones often ignored in the ongoing engagement with his more influential early texts. The sense that Jameson’s career should be re-evaluated, in a manner that pays attention to his wider body of work, seems pertinent in the contemporary context, especially as scholars seek to reassess or move away from his most famous contributions to interpretive practice.
In order to better understand these varying shifts away from Jameson, this book will consider critical reception of his work as it has developed across his career. Despite the wide range of material that has focused on Jameson, rarely have scholars provided a sustained account of the criticism that surrounds him. As discussed above, many of the major books commenting on his career are sympathetic to their subject. Sceptical engagements often take the form of shorter essays and commonly constitute more local discussions of Jameson’s theory. In contrast, I will aim to provide an expanded account of Jameson’s position within critical theory as it has developed over several decades and to consider the major issues that scholars have raised in relation to his work. As discussed above, questions surrounding the political efficacy of Jameson’s project are of ongoing concern for a number of critics. The roles that notions of totality and periodisation have played in Jameson’s theory also continue to be of issue. Scholars have approached these concerns throughout the last three decades in a fluctuating manner and have done so across several areas of study. Here it is important to reiterate that, due to the length of his career, thinking about Jameson’s work requires us to historicise. Within this time frame, approaches to criticism and to canon formation have undergone significant changes. These developments in scholarly production inform contemporary discussions of Jameson’s most influential work, however, as well as the material he continues to produce. My work aims to establish the importance of literature to our perception of Jameson, but also to use this avenue of study in order to reassess his current position as theorist and critic. Inevitably, this work will encounter many of the same issues commonly discussed in relation to Jameson’s theory: questions of totality, of political efficacy, of empiricism, of generalisation and of periodisation. This literary focus will offer a new vantage point from which to consider Jameson, however, and discuss his theoretical principles in terms of his actual critical practice. This work will also accentuate a more complex view of his career and how it has developed, particularly across the last two decades. Here, we can connect Jameson’s work to a multitude of reading strategies as they continue to proliferate in contemporary criticism. This is in contrast to previous work that has sought to think about his relationship to earlier titans of Marxist enquiry or the significance of his theoretical interventions. For this book—even as Jameson’s stature is inevitably related to pivotal and important major works—the ongoing usefulness of his theory and interpretive methods will need to be traced in more local areas of interaction.
Reading Jameson Reading the Novel
Across his work, Jameson closely relates notions of literary style, genre and form to historical context. The interaction between mutations in cultural material and underlying economic change is fundamental to his reading practice and theoretical interventions. This book will organise its chapters around the major categories of literary production that Jameson discusses within three historical periods. These will include: the nineteenth century and the realism that he most commonly considers, predominantly French authors such as Balzac and Gustave Flaubert; the early twentieth century and the high modernism that Jameson focuses on in this era, seen in typically difficult writers such as James Joyce, but also in more conventional novels by E. M. Forster; the post-war period up until the present, where Jameson has discussed developments in the postmodern high-art novel, epitomised by the work of authors such as Pynchon and DeLillo, but also a number of generic fictions, primarily science fiction and detective novels. Each chapter will consider these literatures within the context of Jameson’s larger output and evolving career, seeking to provide a detailed representation of the subtly changing interests found across his remarkably cohesive body of work. As this concentration on period and specific genres or forms suggests, his literary engagement, while often providing close readings of texts, is predominantly interested in the development of the novel as it relates to the expansion of capitalism in the Western world. Authors who provide a highly particular formal example, one that they foster and explore throughout their careers, but who also denote a wider mutation in literary production, are often of particular interest to Jameson. His close readings—while frequently illuminating and multifaceted—commonly seek to frame particular novels within an author’s larger corpus and then extrapolate outwards to consider a literary form’s wider functions and how these relate to wider developments in history. My work will consider how such manoeuvres function within Jameson’s larger theoretical discussions. It will also contrast these more dominant literary categories with the cultural material against which Jameson defines his choices, which he consequently discounts or omits. In this regard, his constructions of varying genres—often through a discussion of what a particular literary form is capable of performing—inevitably hinge on notions of value. Here Jameson performs processes of canonisation and exclusion, despite his many claims to be uninterested in literary worth. These attributions of “possibility” influence his wider claims for the period and often combine a sense of literary value with a text’s potential for “cognitive mapping” operations, while also limiting the reading practices surrounding certain genres. This book will also compare these larger canonising gestures with Jameson’s casual comments about particular literary examples. Increasingly, in his writing and in less formal interviews, he makes numerous assessments of certain authors and novels. He often deploys these judgments with an ironic flourish and only tangentially relates them to his larger theoretical and political concerns.
The chapter on realism will look at one of Jameson’s primary aesthetic concerns. The nineteenth century represents a particularly complex moment in the process of modernisation that, for Jameson, begins in the sixteenth century, and which he also refers to as the “bourgeois cultural revolution”. Here, the development of capitalism and reification in European contexts—particularly that of France—are reflected in mutations in the high realism that he favours. Jameson attributes a particular set of historical tendencies to the nineteenth century in his frequent return to considering the lineage of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola across this period. We can closely link Jameson’s interest in these specific authors to the influence the Western Marxists have had on his theoretical work. In this regard, Lukács in particular has greatly affected Jameson’s engagement with the nineteenth century, and the novels he has chosen to focus on. Within this work, Jameson considers notions of affect, primitive accumulation and subjectivity in relation to form. Often, he sees the increased reification of the social realm—as well as the development of the bourgeois subject—in terms of the changing forms and styles available to each author. In this chapter, I will consider Jameson’s early material and the French and comparative studies background from which his theoretical enquiries stem. I will then look closely at the historical, generic and formal classifications made in The Political Unconscious. The text focuses on European realism and the nineteenth-century romance, but also sees Joseph Conrad’s “proto-modernism” in relation to the earlier realist mode. Jameson explicates a fluid sense of how genres form and interact across the text, yet, in other remarks, inscribes stricter boundaries for the high realism he prefers. Here Jameson’s textual interests often contrast with the scholarly landscape he has influenced, which has often engaged with a more diversified sense of the century’s literature. In a similar manner, the chapter will also consider Jameson’s treatment of literature as reflective of complex historical tendencies, and the difficulty of manoeuvring between larger historical narratives and moments of specificity within this framework. The focus will then shift to The Antinomies of Realism and the ways in which the text offers a new perspective on his earlier sense of the century and the novel form. Within this discussion, I will consider how Jameson’s notions of affect relate to specific examples of affect theory in literary studies.
The second chapter will concentrate on Jameson’s treatment of high-modernist literature. His work on this kind of cultural production is less prominent in several ways and often less cohesive in terms of its focus. Marxism and Form’s most concentrated readings of modernist cultural material focus on Ernest Hemingway and the composer Arnold Schoenberg, for example, with Hemingway rarely figuring in Jameson’s later portrayals of the period. Fables of Aggression purposely looks at the incongruous and controversial modernist Wyndham Lewis, and it has become one of Jameson’s least discussed books. Meanwhile, in influential texts such as The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism, modernism serves as a vanishing point for certain tendencies within both the nineteenth century and late capitalism. In his later book, A Singular Modernity, Jameson builds on the ambiguous nature of high modernism across his project, and he discusses several factors that contribute to the impossibility of defining the modernist period. Characteristically, however, he makes many brief summations of high-modernist literature. In sweeping descriptive passages found across the course of his career, he sees the changes in high modernism as a reflection of increasing capitalist influence, but also as a Utopian gesture in defiance of these larger structural progressions. Working through this fragmentary engagement with high modernism, I will consider Jameson’s common alignment of high modernism with singular, difficult and central figures such as Joyce and Marcel Proust. The chapter will also consider how literature relates to Jameson’s construction of the period in terms of industrial and economic developments, particularly in relation to hiss notion of “Fordism”. These larger and more restrictive descriptions of high modernism will be contrasted, however, with instances where the period and style have operated as a complex and heterogeneous site that refuses to be defined. Intriguingly, high modernism is also the site of much of Jameson’s interest in nation, empire and the postcolonial. The Modernist Papers, along with “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986), represents some of his major considerations of peripheral cultural material. In A Singular Modernity, he also considers the rise in discussions of global modernisms, although he argues against notions of alternate modernities and predominantly concentrates on developments in Western academia. The chapter will consider how Jameson’s work on high modernism might reconcile with a range of scholarly production considering global modernisms, “geomodernisms” or alternate modernities, but also ways in which he has written against common criticisms of generalisation, totalisation and imperialism levelled at his theory.
The chapter on post-war literature will look at Jameson’s depiction of what he calls the “high-art novel” in the late capitalist period, as well as his treatment of generic forms such as the detective novel and science fiction. After spending the early stages of his career predominantly interested in the resolutely highbrow, he comes to find the formal developments as represented by Thomas Pynchon and E. L. Doctorow significantly limited in comparison with high modernism. For Jameson, the period is marked by an increasing reification of the literary field, and he finds the utopian gestures of the high modernists becoming increasingly impossible in postmodernity. Instead, he sees the literature as reflecting or even exacerbating the increased cognitive confusion of late capitalism. The chapter will look particularly at the manner by which Jameson restricts the novels of DeLillo, Doctorow and Pynchon conceptually. Jameson’s depictions of high-postmodern literature often deny a capacity to represent the historical or to map late capitalist reality. The chapter will contrast Jameson’s discussion of these novelists with his large body of work on science fiction authors, predominantly ones writing in the post-war period, such as Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin and Stanislaw Lem. Jameson sees this kind of fiction as offering a rare opportunity to consider our historical predicament in late capitalism. Similarly, he sees the novels of Raymond Chandler as providing cognitive maps of contemporary urban environments comparable to those of certain high-realist works. This chapter will concentrate on Jameson’s proclamation that the aesthetic value of postmodern cultural material is unimportant, even as he attributes expanded conceptual abilities to certain texts. In many ways, we can connect his treatment of these varying literatures with an increased pessimism found in his works of the 1980s and 1990s, with a somewhat dystopian view of postmodernity being heavily applied to its literature. This pessimism will be tempered somewhat with the publication of Archaeologies of the Future. In the text, Jameson argues for a renewed commitment to envisaging the future, despite noting the difficulties of this operation. This discussion will be augmented with a consideration of his more recent work, which has begun to see more opportunity in contemporary fiction, and to consider new representations of history and of global collectivity in cultural material. In this regard, the chapter will close with a discussion of Jameson’s current relationship with postcolonial studies, and how contemporary work on cosmopolitan literatures and peripheral realisms might reconcile with his later material.
The book will conclude by discussing the wider tendencies found in Jameson’s novel reading practice across the previous chapters. In particular, this work will note the extent to which the novel form’s historical development affects Jameson’s larger conception of capitalist expansion, and how notions of formal possibility and his textual preferences have shaped his wider cultural theory. This discussion will foreground the way his work continues to shift, however, in both the elaborations of his more recent material, and in current understandings of his critical reception. The generation of academic heavyweights that preceded Jameson is now replaced by a more obviously heterogeneous set of ambits populating the fields of critical theory and literary studies. We can read his interpretive practice as an intersection of these two moments in scholarly production, and his personal sense of the canon—at times highly traditional and restrictive, at other times inclusive and progressive—mirrors this aspect of his career. In this manner, my work will present a unique view of Jameson, one that sits alongside appraisals that place him more firmly within a lineage of major Marxist theorists. At the same time, the conclusion will consider whether the more recent efforts to criticise his work have properly engaged with Jameson, beyond this more conventional view of his scholarly contributions. As Esty and Lye suggest, the move away from the linguistic turn has seen literary studies’ position within a larger academic landscape recede to some degree. As theorists move to consider affect, the cognitive and the surface in more detail, Jameson’s complex engagement with the literary may still offer opportunities for future production, in ways that scholars are yet to acknowledge.
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We can see Sedgwick’s move away from queer symptomatic reading over the course of her career towards “reparative” reading practices as a precursor to this later development in scholarly production.