The death of Fredric Jameson on September 22, 2024, was a shocking blow to those who knew him personally — students, colleagues, friends, comrades — and the many more who read his vast variegated body of work. Some have suggested that his death marks the end of an epoch: the confluence of the social forces — decolonialism, Marxism, popular culture — that combined with European philosophy to produce Jameson is not easily replicable. Others have noted, dialectically or ironically, that this is itself a profoundly anti-Jamesonian view, for it expresses a vision in which it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Jameson.

But, of course, Jameson always insisted that the most “negative” or ideological elements of the present occasion contain within them some “positive” or utopian prospect. We need only have the energy, skill, and willingness to perceive it. This insistence on identifying the utopian potential of even truly dismal situations was his crowning achievement. In fact, it underwrote his eclectic, open-minded, and yet still profoundly critical approach to everything, including his marvelous generosity and kindness to all who knew him.

Among the more utopian effects already to be found in the aftermath of Jameson’s death, in fact, has been the heartfelt appreciations of the person — that is, Jameson the teacher, the mentor, the guest speaker, the email correspondent, the friend — that so many of his friends, former students, and even apparent strangers have shared online in the last few days. These remembrances testify to Jameson’s inveterate kindness and endless generosity, along with his deep commitments to the welfare of others throughout his career. At the height of his fame, Jameson managed to have or to make time for other people, and — despite his seemingly impossible mastery of all things literary, philosophical, and political — snobbery and elitism were alien to him. As a student, I probably “talked up” to him at times, but he never “talked down” to me, an experience I seem to share with nearly all who interacted with him.

I first met Jameson as a sophomore taking an introductory comp lit course titled simply  “What is Literature?,” a nod to Jean Paul Sartre’s essay of the same name, at Duke University, in spring 1989. A philosophy major narrowly interested in nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought, I discovered through Jameson postcolonial fiction, French poetry as well as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes, thinkers that he could summon as readily as the American literary cannon, which was the mainstay of academic training at the time.

It may seem trite to say, but Jameson loved literature; he did so contagiously. On one occasion, he recited Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Zone” in the French. He wanted us to appreciate the sound of the poem. Literature existed for him as part of a broader world of politics and experience — his lectures leaped balletically from film, architecture, and music. I was deeply affected by this course and its teacher, as is perhaps obvious in my now thirty-five-year-old reminiscences about it. But for me at the time, that was all Jameson was, a great teacher whose class I enjoyed. I knew nothing of his scholarship or criticism beyond the classroom.

I had not yet discovered that Jameson was apparently a “big shot” — he did not conduct himself like one. The Gothic Bookshop featured a section devoted to Duke authors, and I was in the habit of looking for books by professors I admired. (I was lucky to have a number of wonderful professors, across many different fields.) I saw that Professor Jameson had written a book on Sartre, which turned out to be based on his 1959 dissertation from Yale, where he received his PhD in French. Among the many admirers of Jameson’s writing, I suspect I am one of the few today who read Sartre: The Origins of a Style first, before Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, or Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism — so great of an influence was Jameson on the reading of a generation.

I was never as personally close to him as many of his grad students were. Nevertheless, from that semester in 1989 to the present, he has always been a steady presence: supporting my work, offering advice, writing letters of recommendation or endorsements, participating in conferences or special issues, and generally encouraging me in whatever I was up to. I took two more classes with Jameson in college, an upper-level course on film and a grad seminar devoted to Karl Marx’s Grundrisse, during which I became more familiar with Jameson’s own writings as I went on to graduate school myself at the University of Pittsburgh.

Jameson later invited me to be a visiting scholar in the Literature Program at Duke, where I completed my dissertation on Herman Melville and “the literary cartography of the world system,” a rather Jamesonian project, drawing upon his generative critical explorations of globalization, postmodernism, and what he famously called “cognitive mapping.” I would years later write Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism, an introductory study of Jameson’s career. I think it is fair to say that all of my work, including books and articles on a whole range of subjects, but also my approaches to teaching and mentoring students, engaging with colleagues, and participating in the world more generally, has been inspired by Jameson, both as an intellectual and man.

Jameson’s contributions to the critical theory, to the analysis of the forms and content of the world we live in, and to the empowering of the imagination to envision alternatives to the present are immeasurable. But more importantly, perhaps, his thinking has served to inspire others — artists, activists, critics, theorists, and students of all kinds — to extend his efforts.

The best way to honor Fredric Jameson’s memory, after all, will be to think with him, to remember his example while also striking out on our own ruthless critique of all that exists, as the young Marx put it.