Synopses & Reviews
Ideologies of Theory, updated and available for the first time in a single volume, brings together theoretical essays that span Fredric Jameson’s long career as a critic. They chart a body of work suspended by the twin poles of literary scholarship and political history, occupying a space vibrant with the tension between critical exegesis and the Marxist intellectual tradition. Jameson’s work pushes out the boundaries of the text, making evident the interaction between literature and the disciplines of psychoanalysis, philosophy and cultural theory, all of which are shown to be inseparable from their ideological milieu.
The essays in this volume track a shift from ideological analysis to the phenomenology of everyday life, and constitute a rigorous and passionate argument for the necessity of theory as the simultaneous critique of empiricism and idealist philosophy.
Review
"Fredric Jameson is America’s leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction." Terry Eagleton
Review
"Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today … It can be truly said that nothing cultural is alien to him." Colin MacCabe
Synopsis
For the first time, this classic collection of Fredric Jameson's theoretical essays is published in one volume. Most of these pieces were composed under a particular set of constraints'"the need to explain the Marxist intellectual tradition within the bounds of literary criticism'"thereby enlarging the conception of the literary text.
Synopsis
A definitive collection of Jameson's early essays.
About the Author
Fredric Jamesonis Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Ideologies of Theory,Valences of the Dialecticand The Hegel Variations.