Mark Greif in Harper’s Magazine:
It is characteristic of literature departments to see waves come and go. Fredric Jameson represents something like the lapping at the shoreline, which doesn’t go away and never ceases to turn up interesting things: shells, coins, and specimens of marine life heretofore unseen. Not only has Jameson been ceaselessly productive—he has often come bearing news, for more than fifty years.
His topics might at first have seemed esoteric. They became increasingly less so. Jameson initially achieved renown in the early Seventies for examinations of European theories of literature. He explained to Americans a German-language tradition of Western Marxist thinkers. These critics, after the October Revolution, adapted Marx’s thought to the study of the art and culture of the nations outside the Soviet bloc. Many of the books he drew on were still inaccessible in English. Next Jameson essayed Russian and Central European formalists and linguists and their French descendants, the structuralists. (Canonical French literature, from Balzac to Sartre, had been his university specialization.) But it became clear that he was not looking to improve our understanding of individual writers or nations. Jameson was stocking his own armory, from the leavings and detritus of overlooked predecessors on all sides, and reconstituting a tradition he intended to join and master.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.