David Foster Wallace, in his essay “Authority and American Usage,” cites Fredric Jameson by name as one of a group of critics whose “English is deformed” and “prose is appalling — pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipidelian, Heliogabaline, occluded, obscure, jargon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead.”

Wallace hasn’t been the only one to take this view; as he notes, the opening sentence to Jameson’s collection of film criticism, Signatures of the Visible, won first prize in a notorious World’s Worst Writing contest in 1997. It rings a bit odd, however, that Wallace would do this in an essay that became famous for its argument that “issues of English usage are fundamentally and inescapably political” — one of Jameson’s most persistent themes.

Although Wallace wouldn’t say it, both he and Jameson, each on his own terms, direct most of their creative energy at the same general project: making sense of the ways in which the world was being remade around them toward the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, and trying to make peace with how the language they inherited failed to communicate an experience of those changes.