The constant gardener
Fredric Jameson
Imre Szeman,
McMaster University
Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) is one of the most prominent US intellectuals, and
is generally considered to be the foremost theorist of contemporary global
culture from a Marxist perspective. He is William A. Lane Professor of
Critical Theory at Duke University, where he founded the Program in
Literature in 1985, and established the Institute for Critical Theory in
2003.
Jameson's early work introduced Marxist cultural critics (such as Theodor
Adorno, Ernst Bloch, and Herbert Marcuse) and Marxian categories into
Anglo-American literary criticism. His interpretation of these critics,
which he read in conjunction with a wide-range of other theoretical
paradigms (from structuralism to psychoanalysis), resulted in an original
and highly influential form of political criticism. Major works from this
period include Marxism and Form (1971), The Prison House of Language (1972), and The Political Unconscious (1981).
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Jameson's cultural analysis expanded to include
everything from film and video to art and architecture, while simultaneously
becoming more international and global in its emphasis. Signatures of the Visible (1990) and The
Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992) explore the dynamics and politics of
cinema in relation to contemporary society. Jameson's most influential and
important book, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism (1990), argues that shifts in contemporary culture
have to be interpreted in light of broader economic and political changes.
Recent work, including The Cultural Turn (1998) and
The Cultures of Globalization (1998), a collection
edited with Masao Miyoshi, focus directly on the politics of global culture.
Other recent works include: Brecht and Method
(1998), A Singular Modernity (2002), and Mythen der Moderne (2004).