Jameson, Fredric 1934–

views updated

Jameson, Fredric 1934–

(Fredric R. Jameson)

PERSONAL:

Born April 14, 1934, in Cleveland, OH. Education: Haverford University, B.A., 1954; Yale University, M.A., 1956, Ph.D., 1959.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Duke University, Science Bldg., Rm. 125G, Durham, NC 27708. E-mail—jameson@duke.edu.

CAREER:

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, professor, 1959-67; University of California, San Diego, professor, 1967-76; Yale University, New Haven, CT, professor of French and comparative literature, 1976-83; University of California, Santa Cruz, professor, 1983-85; Duke University, William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature, 1986—, professor of Romance studies, and chair of literature program; South Atlantic Quarterly; member of editorial advisory board; Marxist Literary Group, cofounder and teacher.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Rotary fellowship; Woodrow Wilson fellowship; Fulbright fellowship; Humanities Institute grant; Guggenheim fellowships, 1969-70, 1979-80; William Riley Parker Prize, Modern Language Association, 1971, for "Metacommentary"; Lowell Award, Modern Language Association, 1991, for Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

WRITINGS:

Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1961, with new afterword, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1984.

Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1972.

The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1972.

Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1979.

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1981.

Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Modernism and Imperialism, Field Day Theatre Co. (Derry, Northern Ireland), 1988.

The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986 (two volumes), University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1988.

(With Terry Eagleton and Edward W. Said) Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1990.

Signatures of the Visible, Routledge (New York, NY), 1990.

Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic, Verso (New York, NY), 1990.

Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1991.

The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1992.

Theory of Culture: Lectures at Rikkyo, Y. Hamada (Tokyo, Japan), 1994.

The Seeds of Time (Wellek Library lectures), Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Jameson on Postmodernism, Verso (New York, NY), 1997.

Brecht and Method, Verso (New York, NY), 1998.

The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, Verso (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor, with Masao Miyoshi) The Cultures of Globalization, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1998.

The Jameson Reader, edited by Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, Basil Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2000.

A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, Verso (New York, NY), 2002.

Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Verso (New York, NY), 2005.

The Modernist Papers, Verso (New York, NY), 2007.

Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism, edited by Ian Buchanan, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2007.

Coeditor of Social Text, 1979; Minnesota Review; contributing editor; contributor to books, including Formations of Pleasure, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1983; Anti Aesthetics: Essays in Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, Bay Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1983; and Architecture Criticism Ideology ("Revisions Papers in Architectural Theory and Criticism"), Princeton Architectural Press (Princeton, NJ), 1985.

Contributor to periodicals, including PMLA, Salmagundi, Diacritics, College English, Theory and Society, Yale French Studies, New Literary History, Social Text, Minnesota Review, Humanities in Society, New Orleans Review, New Left Review, German Critique, and Critical Inquiry.

SIDELIGHTS:

American Marxist theorist and cultural critic Fredric Jameson can be credited with introducing the Western Hemisphere to several European modes of thinking. Focusing his attention on Marxist dialectical theory as it relates to the arts, Jameson possesses what Sewanee Review contributor George Woodcock described as an "antagonism to the specter he calls the Anglo-American tradition," a position that "can perhaps be explained by his own enthusiasm for the tradition within German philosophy that begins with Hegel and flows through Marx" to writers such as George Lukacs and Jean-Paul Sartre. Jameson is, according to Martin Donougho in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "a master at formulating current issues and problems, as well as ingenious in attempting to resolve them."

Jameson's first book, Sartre: The Origins of a Style, analyzes the work of French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre. Based on Jameson's doctoral dissertation for Yale University, the 1961 work discusses the structure, style, and perspectives of the French author, placing Sartre in a literary historical context while also revealing some cultural interpretation issues. For Jameson, literary history is always evolving. For example, in a 1984 revision of the book, Jameson reassesses his earlier critique of Sartre in a new afterword. While Jameson's perspective on Sartre is not based on the Marxist perspective that shapes his more recent writings, it reveals some elements that critics noted would later incorporate themselves into his critical writing.

Jameson intensely studied Marxian literary theory during the 1960s. One of his first published discussions of the topic was in the article "Metacommentary," which appeared in a 1971 issue of PMLA. This article, which won the William Riley Parker Prize from the Modern Language Association, addresses the nature and problems of dialectical criticism. The article proposes that criticism must reflect on itself. Jameson points out that methods used to interpret a text are as subjective as interpretations of meanings.

Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, which discusses the relationship of social and political thought to literature, again examines Sartre. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism considers the European nondialectical theories of structuralism and formalism. While assessing their historical significance, as explained in the works of Louis Althusser and A.J. Greimas, Jameson points out their flaws, which, he argues, come from an inability to show their own relationship to history.

Situating his theories in an historical context serves as the basis for The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. In this work Jameson argues for analyzing all literature politically rather than from a stylistic, psychoanalytic, or structural perspective. For Jameson, everything is political; all literature is conceived as such and should be read as symbolizing social acts. As Antoine Compagnon explained in the Times Literary Supplement, "The Text attempts to resolve in the domain of the imaginary, the contradictions of social reality … and must be read—interpreted or rewritten—as being itself a rewriting of history and of reality." To illustrate his theories, Jameson explores such authors as Joseph Conrad, George Gissing, and Honoré de Balzac.

Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism evolved from an article of the same title that Jameson published in the New Left Review, in which he assesses the postmodern characteristics of shallowness and pastiche, a lessening of effect and the decentering of the self, using as an example the architectural merits of the Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles. Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is a collection of essays that attempts to categorize postmodernism as a new stage of society. Some trademarks of a postmodern society are the breakdown of theoretical divisions between high art and mass culture and a resistance to interpretation, qualities that underscore society's break with modern culture. The postmodern view of culture, for Jameson, is due to a societal shift to a new global capitalism.

Among Jameson's other cultural critiques are Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, which discusses the work of author Lewis, and Signatures of the Visible and The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, both of which reflect upon culture as depicted in film. In The Geopolitical Aesthetic in particular, according to Minnesota Review contributor Peter Baker, Jameson's Marxist critique, affected as it is by the end of the Cold War, multiculturalism, and globalization, "provides a powerful continuing example of [the] continued vibrancy of Marxist literary theory in the wake of the dissolution of the socialist states in the Soviet bloc." Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic discusses the theories of cultural critic Theodor Adorno, praising him as a significant contemporary thinker in a work that Times Literary Supplement contributor Michael Rosen dubbed a "thorough and well-informed" work that "clearly, firmly and in detail" corrects misperceptions about Adorno's writings on conceptual thought.

The Seeds of Time consists of three chapters, the first of which considers space and time, identity and difference. The second is a reading of Andrei Platonov's novel Chevengur, and the final chapter addresses urbanism and architecture. Barry Schwabsky commented in the Nation that "what Jameson manages to do with Platonov's peasant utopia is to turn it into a kind of critical text itself, a device for estranging more familiarly Western forms of modernist writing in order to show their properties more clearly." Schwabsky wrote that "the implicit subject of The Seeds of Time is timely indeed: our collective failure of historical imagination. It has become, as Jameson remarks, ‘easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.’"

The William A. Lane, Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University since in 1986, Jameson continues to be an active voice in the ongoing analysis of modern culture. His numerous articles touch on topics as diverse as music, architecture, science, and 1960s culture. His work has been translated into eight languages and he has lectured at several universities worldwide. In his essays collected in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, he examines the so-called "end of history" as a result of the advance of capitalism in the global economy of the 21st century. Dubbed one of postmodernism's "most intelligible and accessible gurus" by New Statesman and Society contributor Richard Gott, Jameson's "contributions to the debate about the nature of contemporary culture" continue to be "witty, succinct and immensely readable."

The Jameson Reader is an anthology of Jameson's writings edited by Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Phillip E. Wegner wrote in Utopian Studies: "Hardt and Weeks's introduction to the collection alone makes the volume worth the price of admission. Weeks and Hardt emphasize the ‘great generosity’ of Jameson's thinking, his openness to a breathtaking range of materials, ‘his insatiable appetite for new discoveries,’ and his capacity to make startling connections between apparently disparate materials…. In many ways, as Hardt and Weeks seem to suggest, Jameson's own writing becomes a figure for utopia, a way of doing things largely alien to our world."

In reviewing Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Afterimage reviewer Chris Burnett felt that in following Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, the first of these two volumes "stands as the ultimate stage of Jameson's cycle of volumes on the postmodern imagination." The second volume, which was published first, consists of thirteen articles published since 1973 that focus on science fiction and the image of utopia. The first volume is the introduction to the second.

Arena contributor Peter Fitting noted that Jameson uses "science fiction examples to demonstrate some of his explanations of the dilemma posed by the Utopia," offering "a fascinating study of the representation of the alien in science fiction as a meditation on why and how the truly different of a ‘qualitatively distinct’ society cannot be imagined or thought. Or to put it in opposite terms, science fiction's aliens are little more than amalgams of the already known—the head of an insect, the body of an animal, or the social system of the bees, and so on."

Writing for Utopian Studies, Rob Seguin noted: "The book is replete with readings of key SF writers, from early pioneers like Stapledon and Van Vogt to contemporary artists such as Gibson and Robinson. (Philip K. Dick, the ‘Shakespeare of science fiction,’ receives much attention as well.) Finally, the insistent motif of the collective—its realizability, its desirability, perhaps even its necessity—poses a sharp challenge to our all-too-frequently compartmentalized and monadic habits of mind and returns us to the very roots of political thinking as such." "Jameson convincingly resurrects and imagines utopia as an adaptable tool of progressive politics and culture," concluded Burnett.

The Modernist Papers is a collection of articles and papers written by Jameson over three decades in which he studies the works of modernist Western writers who include Kafka, Proust, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein, as well as Eastern writers such as Oe Kenzaburo and Natsume Soseki. Library Journal contributor T.L. Cooksey, who noted that this is a volume written for academics, described it as being "thoroughly learned and theoretically sophisticated."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Burnham, Clint, The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1995.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 67: Modern American Critics since 1955, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988.

Dowling, William C., Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1984.

Frow, John, Marxism and Literary History, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1986.

Kellner, Douglas, editor, Postmodernism: Jameson Critique, Maisonneuve Press (University Park, MD), 1989.

Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1983.

Scholes, Robert, Textual Power, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1985.

Stringer, Jenny, editor, The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Watkins, Evan, The Critical Act, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1978.

Weber, Samuel, Institution and Interpretation, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1987.

White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1987.

Wise, Christopher, The Marxian Hermeneutics of Fredric Jameson, Lang (New York, NY), 1995.

PERIODICALS

Afterimage, January-February, 2006, Chris Burnett, review of Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, p. 52.

American Ethnologist, August, 1999, Ronald Stade, review of The Cultures of Globalization, p. 780.

Arena (annual), 2006, Peter Fitting, review of Archaeologies of the Future, p. 37, Maria Elisa Cevasco, review of Archaeologies of the Future, p. 52, Dougal McNeill, "Reading the Maps: Realism, Science Fiction and Utopian Strategies."

Choice, April, 1972, review of Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, p. 207; January, 1989, K. Tololyan, review of The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, p. 802; May, 1993, D. Toth, review of The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, p. 1474; March, 2003, N. Lukacher, review of A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, p. 1195; March, 2006, D.C. Greenwood, review of Archaeologies of the Future, p. 1228.

Clio, winter, 1996, Linda Hutcheon, review of The Seeds of Time, pp. 212-216.

Contemporary Sociology, March, 2004, Dora Apel, review of A Singular Modernity, p. 201.

Diacritics, fall, 1982 (special Jameson issue); summer, 1983, pp. 14-28.

Film Quarterly, summer, 1993, Christopher Sharrett, review of The Geopolitical Aesthetic, pp. 39-41.

French Review, April, 1992, Naomi Green, review of Signatures of the Visible, pp. 845-846.

Journal of Asian Studies, May, 2000, Arvind Rajagopal, review of The Cultures of Globalization, p. 388.

Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 37, no. 3, 1999, review of The Cultures of Globalization, pp. 254-255.

Library Journal, October 15, 1972, Sammy Staggs, review of The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, p. 3314; September 15, 2007, T.L. Cooksey, review of The Modernist Papers, p. 61.

London Review of Books, May 1, 1981, Bill Katz, review of Social Text, p. 955; February 4, 1999, David Bromwich, review of The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, pp. 16, 18; March 9, 2006, "Making a Break," p. 25; August 2, 2007, review of Archaeologies of the Future, p. 33; September 15, 2007, T.L. Cooksey, review of The Modernist Papers, p. 61.

Minnesota Review, fall, 1993, Peter Baker, review of The Geopolitical Aesthetic, pp. 263-266.

Modern Fiction Studies, winter, 1982, Jonathan Arac, review of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, pp. 723-725; winter, 1992, Susan E. Hawkins, review of Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, pp. 1003-1005.

Modern Language Quarterly, June, 2007, "Anti-anti: Utopia, Globalization, Jameson," p. 331.

Modern Language Review, January, 1994, Stephen Regan, review of Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, pp. 168-169.

Modern Philology, February, 1992, Barbara Foley, review of The Seeds of Time, pp. 422-426.

Nation, May 29, 1995, Barry Schwabsky, review of The Seeds of Time, p. 762.

New Literary History, summer, 1998, "Marxism and the Historicity of Theory: An Interview with Fredric Jameson."

New Republic, February 19, 1990, David Bromwich, review of The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986, 2 Vols., p. 34.

New Statesman, November 16, 1973, Denis Donoghue, review of The Prison-House of Language, pp. 739-740; March 7, 1980, Alistair Davies, "Beyond the End of Night," pp. 364-366.

New Statesman and Society, March 15, 1991, Stephen Howe, review of Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 34; February 26, 1999, Richard Gott, review of The Cultural Turn, pp. 55-57.

New York Review of Books, April 29, 1982, Denis Donoghue, review of Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, pp. 28-29.

New York Times Book Review, April 12, 1992, Malcolm Bradbury, review of Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 33.

Reference & Research Book News, February, 2006, review of Archaeologies of the Future.

Southern Humanities Review, summer, 1990, Paul Allen Miller, review of The Ideologies of Theory, pp. 274-277; summer, 1993, Nicholas O. Pagan, review of Signatures of the Visible, pp. 269-272; fall, 1993, Mark Conroy, review of Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic, pp. 382-388.

Times Literary Supplement, April 27, 1973, review of Marxism and Form, p. 462; June 8, 1973, review of The Prison-House of Language, p. 636; October 31, 1980, Bernard Berbonzi, review of Fables of Aggression, p. 1216; August 28, 1981, Antoine Compagnon, review of The Political Unconscious, p. 984; May 24, 1991, Michael Rosen, review of Late Marxism, p. 29; April 22, 1994, Robert Potts, review of Signatures of the Visible, p. 18; March 19, 1999, Ronald Speirs, review of Brecht and Method, p. 33; August 20, 1999, Peter Berger, review of The Cultures of Globalization, p. 8; June 16, 2006, "Adorno on Mars," p. 31.

Utopian Studies, spring, 2001, Phillip E. Wegner, review of The Jameson Reader, p. 316; summer, 2006, Rob Seguin, review of Archaeologies of the Future, p. 543.

World Literature Today, spring, 1993, Ralph Flores, review of Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. pp. 459-560.

Yale Review, October, 1972, René Wellek, review of Marxism and Form, pp. 119-126; winter, 1973, review of The Prison-House of Language, pp. 290-292; autumn, 1982, pp. 119-126.