Terry Eagleton at Verso Books:
I first met Fred Jameson in 1976, when he invited me to teach his graduate students at the University of California, San Diego. Before then I had known of his existence only through the stunning Marxism and Form, published five years earlier, a set of coruscating accounts of thinkers such as Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno, Ernst Bloch and others. The book’s very title throws down the gauntlet to a dreary lineage of vulgar Marxist criticism. It also deals with a number of German works, some of them bristling with difficulties, which had not then been translated into English.
I was convinced, then, that the name Fredric Jameson was probably a pseudonym for Hans-Georg Kaufmann or Karl Gluckstein, a refugee from Mitteleuropa holed up in southern California. The man I met, however, who greeted me with a brusqueness which I later learned was shyness, was as American as Tim Walz, though one suspects that Walz doesn’t slink away to read the latest Czech fiction over a glass of wine. He used expressions like ‘look it’ and ‘holy shit’, wore denim jeans, enjoyed eating turf ‘n surf and was clearly uncomfortable in the presence of patrician French intellectuals, much preferring the genial, outgoing Umberto Eco. All this was authentic enough; but he was also an intellectual in a civilisation in which such creatures are well advised to appear in disguise.
More here.
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