Jameson was the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Professor ofComparative Literature, Professor of Romance Studies (French), and Director of the Institute for Critical Theory atDuke University.[8] In 2012, theModern Language Association gave Jameson its sixth Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement.[9]
In 1985 he joinedDuke University as Professor of Literature and Professor of Romance Studies. He established the literary studies program at Duke and held the William A. Lane Professorship of Comparative Literature, renamed in 2013, as Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professorship of Comparative Literature.[24]
Erich Auerbach would prove to be a lasting influence on Jameson's thought. This was already apparent in Jameson'sdoctoral dissertation, published in 1961 asSartre: The Origins of a Style. Auerbach's concerns were rooted in the Germanphilological tradition; his works on the history ofstyle analyzed literary form withinsocial history. Jameson would follow in these steps, examining the articulation of poetry, history,philology, and philosophy in the works ofJean-Paul Sartre, who was the subject of his dissertation.[10]
Jameson's work focused on the relation between the style of Sartre's writings and the political and ethical positions of hisexistentialist philosophy. The occasionalMarxian aspects of Sartre's work were glossed over in this book; Jameson would return to them in the following decade.[26]
His interest in Sartre led Jameson to intense study ofMarxist literary theory. Even thoughKarl Marx was becoming an important influence in Americansocial science, partly through the influence of the many European intellectuals who had sought refuge from theSecond World War in the United States, such asTheodor Adorno, the literary and critical work of theWestern Marxists was still largely unknown in American academia in the late-1950s and early-1960s.[27]
While theOrthodox Marxist view of ideology held that the cultural "superstructure" was completelydetermined by theeconomic "base", the Western Marxists critically analyzed culture as a historical and social phenomenon alongside economic production and distribution or political power relationships. They held that culture must be studied using theHegelian concept ofimmanent critique: the theory that adequate description and criticism of a philosophical or cultural text must be carried out in the same terms that text itself employs, in order to develop its internal inconsistencies in a manner that allows intellectual advancement. Marx highlighted immanent critique in his early writings, derived from Hegel's development of a new form of dialectical thinking that would attempt, as Jameson comments, "to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps".[30]
History came to play an increasingly central role in Jameson's interpretation of both the reading (consumption) and writing (production) ofliterary texts. Jameson marked his full-fledged commitment toHegelian-Marxist philosophy with the publication ofThe Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, the opening slogan of which is "always historicize" (1981).[10]The Political Unconscious takes as its object not the literary text itself, but rather the interpretive frameworks by which it is now constructed. AsJonathan Culler has observed,The Political Unconscious emerged as an alternative method to interpret literary narratives.[31]
The book's argument emphasized history as the "ultimate horizon" ofliterary andcultural analysis. It borrowed notions from the structuralist tradition and fromRaymond Williams's work incultural studies, and joined them to a largely Marxist view oflabor (whether blue-collar or intellectual) as the focal point of analysis. Jameson's readings exploited both the explicit formal and thematic choices of the writer and the unconscious framework guiding these. Artistic choices that were ordinarily viewed in purelyaesthetic terms were recast in terms of historical literary practices and norms, in an attempt to develop a systematic inventory of the constraints they imposed on the artist as an individual creative subject. To further this meta-commentary, Jameson described theideologeme, or "the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes", the smallest legible residue of the real-life, ongoing struggles occurring between social classes.[32][note 2]
Jameson's establishment of history as the only pertinent factor in this analysis, which derived the categories governing artistic production from their historical framework, was paired with a bold theoretical claim. His book claimed to establish Marxian literary criticism, centered in the notion of an artisticmode of production, as the most all-inclusive and comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding literature.[34] According to Vincent B. Leitch, the publication ofThe Political Unconscious "rendered Jameson the leading Marxist literary critic in America."[35]
It is Jameson's contribution to a conception and analysis ofpostmodernism that has had the most impact in its breadth and reach.[36] At the time of his death in 2024, it was generally recognized that he was the preeminent critic of postmodernism.[37] Jameson's contention was that postmodernism is the cultural expression of our own current period oflate capitalism.[38][39] Postmodernism represents the form of an enormous cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style, rather than the production of goods.[40][37]
Jameson developed this form of analysis during a time when "an art-historical debate had wondered for several years whether our age had moved beyond modern art and on to 'postmodern' art".[36] Jameson joined in on the debate in 1984 with his article titled "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" that was first published in the journalNew Left Review.[41] He later expanded the article into a book, which he published in 1991.
Jameson's argument centered around his assertion that the various phenomena of the postmodern had been, or could have been, understood successfully within a modernist framework.[37] This differed from the most prominent views of the postmodern condition that existed at that time. In Jameson's view, postmodernity's merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated whole was the result of the colonization of the cultural sphere—which had retained at least partial autonomy during the prior modernist era—by a newly organizedcorporate capitalism.[42][note 3]
FollowingAdorno andHorkheimer's analysis of theculture industry, Jameson discussed this phenomenon in his critical discussion of architecture, film, narrative, and visual arts, as well as in his strictly philosophical work.[42] For Jameson, postmodernism, as a form of mass-culture driven by capitalism, pervades every aspect of our daily lives.[36]
Two of Jameson's best-known claims fromPostmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism are that post-modernity is characterized by "pastiche" and a "crisis inhistoricity".[43] And since postmodernism —as was mentioned above —represents the form of an enormous cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style, rather than the production of goods,[40] Jameson argued that parody (which implies a moral judgment or a comparison with societal norms) was replaced by pastiche (collage and other forms of juxtaposition without a normative grounding).[43] Jameson recognized thatmodernism frequently "quotes" from different cultures and historical periods, but he argues thatpostmodern cultural texts indiscriminately cannibalize these elements, erasing any sense of critical or historical distance, resulting in pure pastiche.[44]
Relatedly, Jameson argues that the postmodern era suffers from a crisis in historicity: "there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the [...] history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current, multinational, high-rise,stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life".[45]
Jameson's analysis of postmodernism attempts to view it as historically grounded; he therefore explicitly rejects any moralistic opposition to postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon. Instead, Jameson insists upon a Hegelian immanent critique that would "think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together".[46][36]
Some of Jameson's other well-known concepts and philosophical contributions —not mentioned in the preceding section or tangential to his critique of postmodernism— include the concepts of "cognitive mapping"[47] (adapted fromKevin A. Lynch; a form ofclass consciousness mediated bypopular culture that corresponds to the era of capitalistglobalization[48]), the "vanishing mediator",[49] totality as conspiracy,[50] "alternate modernity"[51] (thepostcolonial notion of distinct regional pathways of capitalism, linked to the political project ofBRICS[52]), andantagonism as the principle of totalisation.[53]
Several of Jameson's later works, along withPostmodernism, are part of what he called both a "sequence" and "project" entitledThe Poetics of Social Forms.[36] This project attempts, inSara Danius's words, to "provide a general history of aesthetic forms, at the same time seeking to show how this history can be read in tandem with a history of social and economic formations".[54] While the individual works are formally named on the flyleaf ofInventions of a Present, its more nuanced structure—six volumes comprising seven publications grouped into three subdivisions—can be gleaned from mentions in the books themselves.[note 4]
Alongside this project, Jameson published three related studies ofdialectical theory:Valences of the Dialectic (2009), which includes Jameson's critical responses toSlavoj Žižek,Gilles Deleuze, and other contemporary theorists;The Hegel Variations (2010), a commentary on Hegel'sPhenomenology of Spirit; andRepresenting Capital: A Reading of Volume One (2011), an analysis of Marx'sDas Kapital.[61][62][63][64]
An overview of Jameson's work,Fredric Jameson: Live Theory, byIan Buchanan, was published in 2007.
Jameson was married to Janet Jameson, and then to Susan Willis, and had two sons and five daughters in the two marriages.[10] He died at his home inKillingworth, Connecticut, on September 22, 2024, at the age of 90.[10][65]
TheModern Language Association (MLA) recognized Jameson throughout his career. In 1971, Jameson earned the MLA'sWilliam Riley Parker Prize.[9] Twenty years later, it awarded him its 1991 James Russell Lowell Prize forPostmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.[66]
The latter has remained a landmark publication in its field since it was published in 1991,[67] and is still Duke University Press's all-time bestseller (as of 2024).[68] Jameson was again recognized by the MLA, this time in 2012, with its MLA Lifetime Achievement Award.[68]
In 2009, Jameson was awarded theLyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award by the North AmericanSociety for Utopian Studies.[67] Jameson was given credit for his "significant role in introducing to an English reading audience the rich theorizations of Utopia found in German critical theory, in works written byWalter Benjamin,Herbert Marcuse, and most significantly,Ernst Bloch." It was also noted that "the question of Utopia is central to all of Jameson's work."[67]
In 1987, Jameson published a book entitledPostmodernism and Cultural Theories.[note 6] Although the Chinese intelligentsia's engagement with postmodernism would not begin in earnest until the nineties,Postmodernism and Cultural Theories was to become a keystone text in that engagement; as scholarWang Ning writes, its influence on Chinese thinkers would be impossible to overestimate.[73][note 7][note 8]
This debate over postmodernism, in part fueled by Jameson, was at its most intense from 1994 to 1997, carried on by Chinese intellectuals both inside and outside the mainland; particularly important contributions came from Zhao Yiheng in London, Xu Ben in the United States, and Zhang Xudong, also in the United States, who had gone on to study under Jameson as a doctoral student atDuke.[72]
In 2011,Rey Chow, then chair of Duke University's literature program, reflected on Jameson's career on the occasion of presenting him with a lifetime achievement award:
One would be hard put to find a humanities scholar who is more widely visible and more frequently cited across the disciplines, and who has sustained national and international critical attention for a more extended period of time than Fred Jameson[9]
Robert T. Tally Jr.'s review forJacobin of the 2024 workInventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization described Jameson as:
at the height of his powers, carving out his novel alternative ... [and that] ... for over five decades, Fredric Jameson has been the leading Marxist literary and cultural critic in the United States, if not the world[75]
A memorial piece published by the editorial team of the Marxist journalHistorical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory described Jameson as an "intellectual giant" responsible for an "enduring legacy that has inspired generations of thinkers, activists and scholars".[6] They praised Jameson for his "militant commitment to a materialist reading of moments of struggle and revolt, utopia and liberation in cultural texts."[6]
Another memorial essay inThe Nation observed that Jameson has emerged as a figure who "not only amassed one of the most impressive bodies of work within his field but who also was, fundamentally, someone who believed in criticism as a discourse, between teacher and pupil, between the work and the public".[37]
Postmodernism and Cultural Theories (Chinese:后现代主义与文化理论;pinyin:Hòuxiàndàizhǔyì yǔ wénhuà lǐlùn). Tr. Tang Xiaobing. Xi'an: Shaanxi Normal University Press. 1987.[72]
The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971–1986. Vol. 1: Situations of Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1988.[76] (anthology)
The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971–1986. Vol. 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1988.[76] (anthology)
^By his own account, he only arrived in San Diego in late 1968.[22]
^The term "ideologeme" was first used byMikhail Bakhtin andPavel Nikolaevich Medvedev in their workThe Formal Method in Literary Scholarship and was later popularised byJulia Kristeva. Kristeva defined it as "the intersection of a given textual arrangement ... with the utterances ... that it either assimilates into its own space or to which it refers in the space of exterior texts ...".[33]
"Following Ernest Mandel's periodization in his book Late Capitalism (1975), Jameson claims that "there have been three fundamental moments in capitalism, each one marking a dialectical expansion over the previous stage. These are market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational, capital". To these forms of society correspond the cultural forms realism, modernism, and postmodernism."[42]
IA.Categories of the Narrative-Historical (unpublished at the time of his death)
IB.Allegory and Ideology (2019), "the second volume ofThe Poetics of Social Forms."[55]
IIA.The Antinomies of Realism (2013), "the third volume of the sequence calledThe Poetics of Social Forms."[56]
IIB1.A Singular Modernity (2002), "the theoretical section of the antepenultimate volume ofThe Poetics of Social Forms."[57]
IIB2.The Modernist Papers (2007), "[these analyses] are meant to accompany myA Singular Modernity as a kind of source-book."[58]
IIC.Postmodernism (1991), "the third and last section of the penultimate subdivision of a larger project entitledThe Poetics of Social Forms."[55]
III.Archaeologies of the Future (2005), "the concluding volume ofThe Poetics of Social Forms."[59][36]
^Jameson's ideas as presented at Peking University had an impact on some students, includingZhang Yiwu and Zhang Xudong, scholars whose work would come to play an important role in the analysis of postmodernity in China.[74]
^(Chinese:后现代主义与文化理论;pinyin:Hòuxiàndàizhǔyì yǔ wénhuà lǐlùn), translated into Chinese by Tang Xiaobing.
^Its popularity may be partially due to the fact that it was not written in a dense style and so it was possible to use the text as both praise and/or criticism of the Chinese manifestation of postmodernity.[73]
^However, inWang Chaohua's interpretation of events, Jameson's work was mostly used to support and praise, and therefore amounted to a fundamental misreading of Jameson:
The caustic edge of Jameson's theory, which had described postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism", was abandoned for a contented or even enthusiastic endorsement of mass culture, which [a certain group of Chinese critics] saw as a new space of popular freedom. According to these critics, intellectuals, who conceived of themselves as the bearers of modernity, were reacting with shock and anxiety at their loss of control with the arrival of postmodern consumer society, uttering cries of "quixotic hysteria", panic-stricken by the realization of what they had once called for during the eighties.[72]
^abc"Jameson, Fredric",The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, September 12, 2022, archived fromthe original on September 20, 2024, retrievedSeptember 24, 2024
^abc"Frederick Jameson",United States census, 1940; Gloucester City, Camden, New Jersey; roll T627 2321, page 61A [i.e. 16A], line 15, enumeration district 52, National Archives film number 131751142. Retrieved on September 25, 2024.
^ab"Frederic Jameson",United States census, 1950; Haddon Heights, Camden, New Jersey; page 7, line 6, enumeration district 125. Retrieved on September 25, 2024.
^Fredric Jameson, "Interview with Srinivas Aramudan and Ranjanna Khanna," inJameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism, ed. Ian Buchanan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 204.
^Jameson, Fredric.The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982. p. 76
^Kristeva, Julia. "Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art". Ed.Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora,Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. pp. 2, 36.
^Fredric Jameson,The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1981, p. 10
^SeeJameson, Fredric (1992), "Totality as Conspiracy",The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 9–84, reprinted inPost-war Cinema and Modernity: A Film Reader, ed. John Orr and Olga Taxidou, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2000, pp. 119–132.
^SeeJameson, Fredric (2002),A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, London: Verso, pp. 12–13
Leitch, Vincent B. (2010),American Literary Criticism since the 1930s (2 ed.), London: Routledge,ISBN978-0-415-77817-6
Mohanty, Satya P. (1997),Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,doi:10.7591/9781501728938,ISBN978-0-8014-2902-6
Arac, Jonathan (1987), "Frederic Jameson and Marxism",Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies, New York:Columbia University Press, pp. 261–279
Carter, Stephen D. (2016), "The Dialectic of War and Utopia: Systemic Closure and Embattled Social Life in the Work of Fredric Jameson",Criticism,58 (2):177–204,doi:10.13110/criticism.58.2.0177
Eagleton, Terry (1982), "Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style",Diacritics,12 (3):14–22,doi:10.2307/464940,JSTOR464940 (reprinted in T. Eagleton,Against the Grain: Selected Essays 1975–1985, London: Verso, 1986, pp. 65–78).
Helmling, Stephen.The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2001.
Homer, Sean.Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. 1998.
Hullot-Kentor, Robert. "Suggested Reading: Jameson on Adorno". InThings Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 220–233.
Irr, Caren and Ian Buchanan, eds.On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2005.
Kellner, Douglas, and Sean Homer, eds.Fredric Jameson: a Critical Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004.
Kunkel, Benjamin. "Into the Big Tent".London Review of Books 32.8 (April 22, 2010). 12–16.
Kouvelakis, Stathis (2007), "Fredric Jameson: An Unslaked Thirst for Totalisation", in Bidet, Jacques; Kouvelakis, Stathis (eds.),Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, Leiden:Brill, pp. 697–709,doi:10.1163/ej.9789004145986.i-813.195
LaCapra, Dominick (1983), "Marxism in the Textual Maelstrom: Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious",Rethinking Intellectual History, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 234–267
Link, Alex. "The Mysteries ofPostmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson's Gothic Plots."Theorising the Gothic. Eds. Jerrold E. Hogle and Andrew Smith. Special issue ofGothic Studies 11.1 (2009): 70–85.
Millay, Thomas J. "Always Historicize! On Fredric Jameson, the Tea Party, and Theological Pragmatics."The Other Journal 22 (2013).
Tally, Robert (1996), "Jameson's Project of Cognitive Mapping", in Paulston, Rolland G. (ed.),Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change, New York:Garland, pp. 399–416
Vázquez-Arroyo, Antonio Y. (2023), "Fredric Jameson: Dialectical Criticism and the Politics of Theory",Polity,55 (4):720–744,doi:10.1086/726475
Weber, Samuel (1983), "Capitalising History: Notes on The Political Unconscious", in Barker, Francis; Hulme, Peter; Iversen, Margaret; Loxley, Diana (eds.),The Politics of Theory, Colchester: University of Essex Press, pp. 248–264
White, Hayden (1982), "Getting Out of History",Diacritics,12 (3):2–13,doi:10.2307/464939,JSTOR464939 (reprinted asGetting Out of History: Jameson's Redemption of Narrative, in H. White,The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 142–168)
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