Fredric Jameson, "who held sway as one of the world's leading literary theorists for over 40 years, bringing his brand of rigorous, incisive Marxist criticism to topics as broad as German opera, sci-fi films and luxury hotel design," died September 22, the New York Times reported. He was 90. Jameson was the author of more than 30 books and edited collections, as well as reams of journal articles. He spent much of his career as a professor at Duke University.
Jameson was best known for two singular achievements, the Times wrote, noting that "starting in the early 1970s, he led the effort to import into American circles the critical perspectives of Western Marxism--a diverse set of ideas, popular in France and Germany, arranged around the notion that culture was closely related to a society's economic base, though not completely constrained by it."
He brought that analysis, formulated in the industrialized first half of the 20th century, into the globalizing, technology-driven second half. In the mid-1980s, he "used that same arsenal of ideas to confront his second challenge: a critique of postmodernism, which, beginning in the 1970s, had taken hold in academic departments to describe what many saw as the breakdown of grand narratives about history, culture and society," the Times noted. In response, he "argued postmodernism was itself just one more grand narrative, albeit one that tried to disguise its own status."
Jameson summarized much of this work in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981). His other books include Marxism and Form (1971), The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), The Seeds of Time (1994), The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (1998), and Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality (2016).
His most recent book, Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, was released in May; and another, The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, will be published next month.
Verso, which published more than 20 of his books as well as several more featuring contributions from him, shared some of Jameson's work on modernism, Benjamin, Hegel, and more on the publisher's blog, noting: "Few radical thinkers have had such a phenomenal impact on literary criticism, critical theory, and philosophy."
In a tribute, A.O. Scott, a critic at large for the Times's Book Review, observed that at the time of his death, Jameson "was arguably the most prominent Marxist literary critic in the English-speaking world. In other words, he was a fairly obscure figure: well-known--revered, it's fair to say--within a specialized sector of an increasingly marginal discipline. I don't say that to diminish his importance, but rather to make a case for it....
"Not that reading him could ever be easy: Criticism, as he understood it, could never be, because of the complexity of its objects and its need to perpetually revise, refine and question its own procedures. To my mind, nobody did this as doggedly--or should I say as dialectically, with such a clearly articulated sense of the intellectual stakes--as Jameson."