On Jameson

From Postmodernism to Globalization

Edited by Caren Irr & Ian Buchanan

Subjects: Cultural Studies
Paperback : 9780791465929, 296 pages, December 2005
Hardcover : 9780791465912, 296 pages, December 2005

Table of contents

Introduction
Caren Irr and Ian Buchanan

PART I CENTRAL CONCEPTS

1. Generally Historicizing
Evan Watkins

2. History, Narrative, and Realism: Jameson’s Search for a Method
Carolyn Lesjak

3. A Level Playing Field? Metacommentary and Marxism
Roland Boer

4. Narratives of History, Narratives of Time
Sean Homer

PART II REACTIONS AND READINGS AROUND THE WORLD

5. Cultural Revolution, the Discourse of Intellectuals, and Other Folk Tales
Robert Seguin

6. Construction Work: Theory, Migration, and Labor in the Age of Globalization
Michael Rothberg

7. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Postcommunism?: The Cultures of the Former Soviet Bloc Encounter Jameson
Vitaly Chernetsky

PART III TOWARD GLOBALIZATION

8. National Allegory Today: A Return to Jameson
Ian Buchanan

9. Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization
Imre Szeman

10. The American Grounds of Globalization: Jameson’s Return to Hegel
Caren Irr

11. Periodizing Jameson, or, Notes toward a Cultural Logic of Globalization
Philip E. Wegner
Contributors
Index

Offers an interrogation of Jameson's critical legacy.

Description

One of the leading figures in the debate over postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s, Fredric Jameson is regarded as the most important Marxist theoretician and cultural critic writing in America today. Although Jameson's significance as a global intellectual has been widely recognized for some time, none of the literature covers the full range of his work. This timely collection reflects on Jameson's entire body of work and demonstrates its potential to shape the emerging field of globalization studies. Experts in literary theory, Slavic studies, film criticism, and Biblical studies explore the significance of Jameson's work for their diverse fields. The contributors treat Jameson's work as a complicated and interconnected whole, and deal with many topics, including his influence in China and Russia, his interests in second- and third-world cinema and literature, and his lifelong passion for science fiction. As On Jameson reveals, integrating these concerns is Jameson's project of producing a critical theory of contemporary global cultures.

Caren Irr is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at Brandeis University. She is the coeditor (with Jeffrey T. Nealon) of Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique, also published by SUNY Press, and the author of The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the U. S. and Canada during the 1930s. Ian Buchanan is Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. He is the author of Deleuzism: A Metacommentary and Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist.