Fredric Jameson (b. April 14, 1934) is a Marxist political and literary critic and theorist. He is best known for the analysis of contemporary cultural trends; he described postmodernism as the claudication of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Political Unconscious, and Marxism and Form. April 14 is the 104th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (105th in leap years). ... 1934 was a common year starting on Monday (link will take you to calendar). ... Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. ... The Elections and Parties Series Democracy Representative democracy History of democracy Referenda Liberal democracy Representation Voting Voting systems Ideology Elections Elections by country Elections by calender Electoral systems Politics Politics by country Political campaigns Political science Political philosophy Related topics Political parties Parties by country Parties by name Parties by... Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. ... Literary theory is the theory (or the philosophy) of the interpretation of literature and literary criticism. ... Cultural studies developed in the late 20th century, in part through the re-introduction of Marxist thought into sociology, and in part through the articulation of sociology and other academic disciplines such as literary criticism. ... Post-modernist architecture rejects the rigid geometricity of modernist design in favour of radical, often asymmetrical, forms Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or... Claudication, literally limping, is used as a medical term in various contexts. ... Capitalism has been defined in various ways (see Capitalism in Wikiquote). ...

He currently holds the William A. Lane Chair of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University. 2005 is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Comparative literature, colloquially abbreviated comp. ... The Romance languages, also called Romanic languages or New Latin Languages, are a subset of the Italic languages, specifically the descendants of the Latin dialects spoken by the common people in what is known as Latin Europe (Italian/Portuguese/Spanish Europa latina, French Europe latine, Romanian Europa latină) as Vulgar... Duke Chapel Duke University is a private, coeducational university in Durham, North Carolina in the United States. ...

Life and works

Jameson was born in Cleveland, Ohio. After graduating from Haverford College in 1954, he briefly travelled to Europe, studying at Aix-en-Provence, Munich and Berlin, where he learned of new developments in continental philosophy including the rise of structuralism. He returned to America the following year to pursue a doctoral degree at Yale, where he studied under Erich Auerbach. Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... State nickname: The Buckeye State Other U.S. States Capital Columbus Largest city Columbus Governor Bob Taft (R) Official languages None Area 116,096 km² (34th)  - Land 106,154 km²  - Water 10,044 km² (8. ... Haverford College is a coeducational, undergraduate liberal arts college in Haverford, Pennsylvania. ... 1954 was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Aix (prounounced eks), or, to distinguish it from other cities built over hot springs, Aix-en-Provence is a city in southern France, some 30 km north of Marseille. ... Munich: Frauenkirche and Town Hall steeple Munich (German: München (pronounced listen) is the state capital of the German state of Bavaria. ...   Berlin? (pronounced: , German ) is the capital of Germany and its largest city, with 3,426,000 inhabitants (as of January 2005); down from 4. ... Continental philosophy is a general term for several related philosophical traditions that (notionally) originated in continental Europe, in contrast with Anglo_American analytic philosophy. ... Structuralism is general approach in various academic disciplines that seeks to explore the inter-relationships between some fundamental elements, upon which higher mental, linguistic, social, cultural etc structures are built, through which then meaning is produced within a particular person, system, culture. ... Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. ... Yale can refer to: Yale University, one of the United States oldest and most famous universities. ... Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) was a German philologist, comparative scholar, historian, and critic of literature. ...

Early works

Erich Auerbach would prove to be a lasting influence on Jameson's thought. This was already apparent in his doctoral dissertation, which would be published in 1961 as Sartre: the Origins of a Style. Auerbach's concerns were rooted in the German philological tradition; his works on the history of style analyzed literary form within social history. Jameson would follow in these steps, examining the articulation of poetry, history, philology, and philosophy in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. This article is about the thesis in dialectics and academia. ... 1961 was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... Philology is the study of ancient texts and languages. ... Style may refer to genre, design, format, or appearance, including: Clothing: fashion Flower part: flower Music: music genre Sundial part: Gnomon Titles or honorifics: Style (manner of address) including Chinese courtesy names Web design: Cascading Style Sheets Writing: style guide and literary genre Linguistics: Variation in language use of an... Social history is an area of historical study considered by some to be a social science that attempts to view historical evidence from the point of view of developing social trends. ... Bust of Homer, one of the earliest European poets, in the British Museum Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. ... The History of Video Games History Forums - History is Happening -Discuss all historical topics, as well as current events, in an academic setting. ... Philology is the study of ancient texts and languages. ... Philosophy is a discipline or field of study involving the investigation, analysis, and development of ideas at a general, abstract, or fundamental level. ... Jean Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Sartre (June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist, novelist and critic. ...

Jameson's work focused on the relation between the style of Sartre's writings and the political and ethical positions of his existentialist philosophy. The occasional Marxian aspects of Sartre's work were glossed over in this book; Jameson would come back to them in the following decade. Existentialism is a philosophical movement that views the individual, the self, the individuals experience, and the uniqueness therein as the basis for understanding the nature of human existence. ... Marxian economics refers to a body of economic thought stemming from the work of Karl Marx. ...

Jameson's dissertation, though it drew on a long tradition of European cultural analysis, differed markedly from the prevailing trends of Anglo-American academia (which were empiricism and logical positivism in philosophy and linguistics, and New Critical formalism in literary criticism). It nevertheless earned Jameson a position at Harvard University, where he would teach for during the first half of the 1960s. Empiricism (greek εμπειρισμός, from empirical, latin experientia - the experience), not to be confused with imperialism, is the philosophical doctrine that all human knowledge comes at first from senses and experience. ... Logical positivism (later referred to as logical empiricism) holds that philosophy should aspire to the same sort of rigor as science. ... Broadly conceived, linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ... New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the early twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. ... The word formalism has several meanings: A certain school in the philosophy of mathematics, stressing axiomatic proofs through theorems specifically associated with David Hilbert. ... Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. ... Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ... The 1960s, or The Sixties, in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1960 and 1969, but the expression has taken on a wider meaning over the past twenty years. ...

Research into Marxism

His interest in Sartre led Jameson to intense study of Marxist literary theory. Even though Karl Marx was becoming an important influence in American social science, partly through the influence of the many European intellectuals who had sought refuge from the Second World War in the U.S., the literary and critical work of the Western Marxists were still largely unknown in American academia in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Marxist literary criticism is a loose term describing literary criticism informed by the philosophy or the politics of Marxism. ... Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883 London, UK) was an influential German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer of the International Workingmens Association, two of whose books in particular, Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto (the latter with Friedrich Engels), laid the... Terms like SOSE (Studies of Society & the Environment) not only refer to social sciences but also studies of the environment. ... Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km into the air. ... In a sociological sense, neo-Marxism adds Max Webers broader understanding of social inequality -- such as status and power -- to Marxist philosophy. ...

Jameson's shift toward Marxism was also driven by his increasing political connection with the New Left and pacifist movements. His research focused on thinkers such as Gyorgy Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Sartre, who viewed cultural criticism as an integral feature of Marxist theory. This position represented a break with more orthodox Marxism-Leninism, which held a narrow view of historical materialism. The New Left is a term used in political discourse to refer to radical left-wing movements from the 1960s onwards. ... Pacifist may mean: an advocate of pacifism. ... Georg Lukács (April 13, 1885 - June 4, 1971) was a Hegelian and Marxist philosopher and literary critic. ... Ernst Bloch (July 8, 1885 - August 4, 1977) was a German Marxist philosopher and atheist theologian. ... Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German sociologist, philosopher, musicologist and composer. ... Benjamin, in 1938. ... Herbert Marcuse Herbert Marcuse (July 19, 1898 – July 29, 1979) was a prominent German-American philosopher and sociologist of Jewish descent, member of the Frankfurt School. ... A critic (derived from the ancient Greek word krites meaning a judge) is a person who offers a value judgement or an interpretation. ... Vladimir Lenin in 1920 Leninism is a political and economic theory which builds upon Marxism; it is a branch of Marxism (and it has been the dominant branch of Marxism in the world since the 1920s). ... Historical materialism (or what Marx himself preferred to call the materialist conception of history - materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung) is a social theory and an approach to the study of history and sociology, normally considered as the intellectual basis of Marxism. ...

While the traditional Leninist view of ideology held that the cultural "superstructure" was completely determined by the economic "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 the Hegelian concept of immanent critique: the theory that adequate description and criticism of a philosophical or cultural text must be carried out in the same terms that itself employs, in order to develop its internal inconsistencies in a manner that allows intellectual advancement. Immanent critique had been highlighted by Marx in his early writings, but later Soviet Marxism had not developed the practice. The Elections and Parties Series Democracy Representative democracy History of democracy Referenda Liberal democracy Representation Voting Voting systems Ideology Elections Elections by country Elections by calender Electoral systems Politics Politics by country Political campaigns Political science Political philosophy Related topics Political parties Parties by country Parties by name Parties by... // Sociological concept In social sciences, superstructure is the set of socio-psychological feedback loops that maintain a coherent and meaningful structure in a given society, or part thereof. ... U.S. Economic Calendar Economics at the Open Directory Project Economics textbooks on Wikibooks The Economists Economics A-Z Institutions and organizations Bureau of Labor Statistics - from the American Labor Department Center for Economic and Policy Research (USA) National Bureau of Economic Research (USA) - Economics material from the organization... G.W.F. Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. ...

Analysis of structuralism

At the same time, Jameson studied the main current alternative to Marxist analysis, as it was taking shape in Europe: the structuralist theory of language and literature. After moving to the University of California, San Diego in 1967, Jameson published Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971) and The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972). Structuralism is general approach in various academic disciplines that seeks to explore the inter-relationships between some fundamental elements, upon which higher mental, linguistic, social, cultural etc structures are built, through which then meaning is produced within a particular person, system, culture. ... The University of California, San Diego (popularly known as UCSD) is a public, coeducational university located in La Jolla, California. ... 1967 was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1971 is a common year starting on Friday (click for link to calendar). ... 1972 was a leap year that started on a Saturday. ...

Both these books attempted to engage with features of mainstream literary and academic life that Jameson perceived as tending toward detachment from reality. Enshrining the work of art as an object completely separate from the context of its production through the humanist praise of the artist, and the anti-historical formalism derived from a restrictive interpretation of structuralist method, were both criticized. Jameson saw both trends as failures to perceive the key elements of the contemporary production and consumption of artistic objects. At the same time, Jameson held, as in previous works, that cultural objects must be understood according to cultural rules; he argued that careful and detailed analysis of cultural practices would reveal art and culture to be grounded in economic realities. Humanism is a term assigned different and contradictory meanings by different authors at different times. ... The word formalism has several meanings: A certain school in the philosophy of mathematics, stressing axiomatic proofs through theorems specifically associated with David Hilbert. ...

Jameson's work during the 1970s continued in this direction. It combined a multi-layered appraisal of literary texts, including genres and authors intensely modern but then scarcely treated by academic studies, ranging from science fiction to Raymond Chandler, with theoretical discussions of ideology, modernism and literary history. A genre is any of the traditional divisions of art forms from a single field of activity into various kinds according to criteria particular to that form. ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... Raymond Chandler Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American author of crime stories and novels. ... The Elections and Parties Series Democracy Representative democracy History of democracy Referenda Liberal democracy Representation Voting Voting systems Ideology Elections Elections by country Elections by calender Electoral systems Politics Politics by country Political campaigns Political science Political philosophy Related topics Political parties Parties by country Parties by name Parties by... Le Corbusiers Villa Savoye, 1929-30: The modern style is noted for its rigorous geometrical forms. ... The history of literature is the historical development of writings in prose or poetry which attempt to provide entertainment, enlightenment, or instruction to the reader/hearer/observer, as well as the development of the literary techniques used in the communication of these pieces. ...

Narrative and history

History came to play an increasingly central role in Jameson's interpretation of both the reading (consumption) and writing (production) of literary texts. Jameson marked his full-fledged commitment to Hegelian-Marxist philosophy with the publication of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981). Rather than developing new theories for the analysis of literature, The Political Unconscious set out rigorously to ascertain the relation between the historical circumstances of a text and its content. 1981 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

The book's argument emphasized history as the focal point of literary and cultural analysis. It borrowed notions from the structuralist tradition and from Raymond Williams's work in cultural studies, and joined them to a largely Marxist view of labor (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 purely aesthetic 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. Raymond Williams (1921 - 1988) was a highly influential Welsh academic, novelist and critic. ... Cultural studies combines sociology, literary theory, film/video studies, and cultural anthropology to study cultural phenomena in industrial societies. ... Aesthetics (or esthetics) (from the Greek word αισθητική) is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty. ...

Jameson's establishment of history as the key factor in this analysis, which derived the categories governing artistic production from their historical framework, was paired with a bold theoretical claim. Jameson's book claimed to establish Marxian literary criticism, centered in the notion of an artistic mode of production, as the most all-inclusive and comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding literature. The groundwork laid out in this book would serve as a basis for another of Jameson's best-known works. // General In Karl Marxs theory of historical materialism, a mode of production (in German: Produktionsweise, meaning the way of producing) is a specific combination of: productive forces: these include human labor-power, tools, equipment, buildings and technologies, materials, and improved land social relations of production: these include the property...

The critique of postmodernism

"Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" was initially published in the journal New Left Review in 1984, during Jameson's tenure as Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This controversial article, which would later be expanded to a full-sized book, was part of a series of analyses of postmodernism from the dialectical point of view Jameson had developed in his earlier work on narrative. Jameson here viewed the postmodern "skepticism towards metanarratives" as a "mode of experience" stemming from the conditions of intellectual labor imposed by the late capitalist mode of production. In 1960 in the UK, the editors of the New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review merged their boards and formed the New Left Review. ... 1984 is a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC or UC Santa Cruz) is a coeducational public university located in Santa Cruz, California, USA. It is one of the ten campuses of the University of California. ... Post-modernist architecture rejects the rigid geometricity of modernist design in favour of radical, often asymmetrical, forms Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or... In critical theory, and particularly postmodernism, a metanarrative is a grand overarching account, or all-encompassing story, which is thought to give order to the historical record. ... Late capitalism is a term sometimes used to refer to capitalism of the late 20th century. ...

Postmodernists claimed that the complex differentiation between "spheres" or fields of life (such as the political, the social, the cultural, the commercial, etc.) and between distinct classes and rôles within each field, had been overcome by the crisis of foundationalism and the consequent relativization of truth-claims. Jameson argued, against this, that these phenomena had or could have been understood successfully within a modernist framework; postmodern failure to achieve this understanding implied an abrupt break in the dialectical refinement of thought. Social class describes the relationships between people in hierarchical societies or cultures. ... A function is part of an answer to a question about why some object or process occurred in a system that evolved or was designed with some goal. ... Foundationalism is any theory in epistemology (typically, theories of justification, but also of knowledge) that holds that beliefs are justified (known, etc. ...

In his 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 organized corporate capitalism. Following Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the culture industry, Jameson discussed this phenomenon in his critical discussion of architecture, film, narrative and visual arts, as well as in his strictly philosophical work. Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg Max Horkheimer (February 14, 1895 - July 7, 1973) was a German philosopher and sociologist, known especially as the founder and guiding thinker of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. ... The term culture industry was coined by Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895-1973). ... Architecture (in Greek αρχή = first and τέχνη = craftsmanship) is the art and science of designing buildings and structures. ... Film refers to the celluloid media on which movies are printed Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as the field in general. ... The visual arts are a class of artforms, including painting, sculpture, photography, and others, that focus on the creation of artworks which are primarily visual in nature. ...

Jameson's analysis of postmodernism attempted to view it as historically grounded; he therefore explicitly rejected any moralistic opposition to postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon, and continued to insist upon a Hegelian immanent critique. His failure to dismiss postmodernism from the onset, however, was perceived by many as an implicit endorsement of postmodern views.

Recent work

Jameson's later work has dispelled the perception that he is sympathetic to postmodern thought. He turned to Adorno again in search of a contemporary theoretical framework for Marxian dialectics. He supplemented his critique of postmodernism with additional material, appearing first in a casebook compiled by Douglas Kellner in 1989 under the title Postmodernism/Jameson, Critique and then in the extended version of the 1984 article, published in book form as Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in 1991. This book earned him the Modern Language Association's Lowell Award. 1989 is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1991 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Modern Language Association of America (often abbreviated MLA) is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of literature and literary criticism. ...

During the 1990s Jameson further developed this line of thought in the 1994 Seeds of Time, in his Wellek Library lectures at the University of California, and in the 1998 Brecht and Method. This last was an analysis of the political and social context surrounding Brecht's political commitment. 1994 was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International year of the Family. ... 1998 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... Brecht Bertolt Brecht (February 10, 1898 – August 14, 1956) was an influential German dramatist, stage director, and poet of the 20th century. ...

Bibliography

• Jameson, Fredric (1961). Sartre: The Origins of a Style. New Haven: Yale University Press. .
• Jameson, Fredric (1971). Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories f Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. .
• Jameson, Fredric (1972). The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. .
• Jameson, Fredric (1979). Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: University of California Press. .
• Jameson, Fredric (1981). The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. .
• Jameson, Fredric (1988). The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971-1986. Vol. 1: Situations of Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. .
• Jameson, Fredric (1988). The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971-1986. Vol. 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. .
• Jameson, Fredric (1987). Postmodernism and Cultural Theories. Lectures in China (Houxiandaizhuyi he Wenhualilun). Xi'an: Shanxi Teacher's University. .
• Jameson, Fredric (1990). Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. London & New York: Verso. .
• Jameson, Fredric (1990). Signatures of the Visible. New York & London: Routledge. .
• Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. .
• Jameson, Fredric (1992). The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. .
• Jameson, Fredric (1994). The Seeds of Time. The Wellek Library lectures at the University of California, Irvine. New York: Columbia University Press. .
• Jameson, Fredric (1998). Brecht and Method. London & New York: Verso. .

External Links

• Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory
• Complete Bibliography of Jameson from the 1991 Wellek Library Lectures

Articles by Jameson

• Fear and Loathing in Globalization
• Future City
• Globalization and Political Strategy
• The Politics of Utopia