Books by Fredric Jameson

Jameson's study of the cultural, political and social implications of postmodernism.

Jameson's first full-length engagement with Walter Benjamin's work

In three parts, Jameson presents the postmodern problem of Utopia, attempting to diagnose the cultural present and to open a perspective on the future of a world that is all but impossible to predict with any certainty-"a telling of the future," as Jameson calls it, "with an imperfect deck."

Fredric Jameson is one of the influential literary and cultural critics writing. His ideas about the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences. This book discusses his intellectual and political preoccupations, his commitment to Marxism and the culture it has engendered.

This ground-breaking and influential study explores the complex place and function of literature within culture. It takes its place as one of the most meaningful works of the twentieth century.

For more than thirty years, Fredric Jameson has been one of the most productive, wide-ranging, and distinctive literary theorists in the United States and the Anglophone world. Marxism and Form provided a pioneering account of the work of the major European Marxist theorists--T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, and Jean-Paul Sartre--work that was, at the time, largely neglected in the English-speaking world. Through penetrating readings of each theorist, Jameson developed a critical mode of engagement that has had tremendous in.uence. He provided a framework for analyzing the connection between art and the historical circumstances of its making--in particular, how cultural artifacts distort, repress, or transform their circumstances through the abstractions of aesthetic form. Jameson's presentation of the critical thought of this Hegelian Marxism provided a stark alternative to the Anglo-American tradition of empiricism and humanism. It would later provide a compelling alternative to poststructuralism and deconstruction as they became dominant methodologies in aesthetic criticism. One year after Marxism and Form, Princeton published Jameson's The Prison-House of Language (1972), which provided a thorough historical and philosophical description of formalism and structuralism. Both books remain central to Jameson's main intellectual legacy: describing and extending a tradition of Western Marxism in cultural theory and literary interpretation.

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.