How Fredric Jameson Remade Literary Criticism
Throughout his career, the critic Fredric Jameson has pitted himself against reductive Marxist approaches to culture and a close reading tradition blind to politics. His latest book shows him at the height of his powers, carving out his novel alternative.
Fredric Jameson, photographed in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2000. (Fronteiras do Pensamento / Wikimedia Commons)
For over five decades, Fredric Jameson has been the leading Marxist literary and cultural critic in the United States, if not the world. At ninety, he shows few signs of slowing down. His latest book, Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, came out in May, and The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present is scheduled to appear later this year. Jameson is also in the process of completing what will be the last volume of his six-part project, The Poetics of Social Forms — in true dialectical fashion, the series’ concluding book is volume 1.
Born in Cleveland in 1934, Fredric Jameson attended Haverford College, where he studied with the legendary rhetorical theorist Wayne Booth, who coined the term “unreliable narrator.” After majoring in French, Jameson would conclude his studies at Yale where he would earn a PhD in 1959. He has spent his professional and academic career in French, Romance studies, or comparative literature programs (not English, as it happens), first at Harvard, then the University of California, San Diego; Yale; UC Santa Cruz; and since 1985, Duke University. Accordingly, his perspective has always straddled both coasts: looking at the continent from the United States for insights. Jameson’s vast teaching experience undoubtedly informs the wide ranges of subjects, languages, literatures, and theories that make up his body of work.
Make Literary Criticism Marxist Again
For all his literary productivity, Jameson has always been and remains a teacher, and so much of his work — both in the classroom (where I first encountered him as a student in 1989) and in his writings — has a profoundly pedagogical aspect to it. In Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971), he introduced English-speaking readers to the rich tradition of Western Marxist theory, examining the work of Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
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