Frederic Jameson is an American
Marxist scholar and
cultural theorist who is best known for his book "
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism".
Born in 1934 in Cleveland, Ohio, Jameson studied at Haverford College, Yale, and the universities of Aix-Marseille, Munich, and Berlin. Since 1986 he has been on the faculty of Duke University in North Carolina, and is presently Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature there, where he directs
the Graduate Program in Literature and the Center for Cultural Theory.
It is said that Jameson helped to "popularize" postmodernism, which he says corresponds to a phase of late capitalism. In many ways his work carries on from the Frankfurt School.
Central ideas of Jameson:
- Commodification of culture.
- Increases in culture and cultural outlets; formation of the culture industry.
- A breakdown in the distinction between
culture and the society that
produces it. (E.g., the Beatles had
control of their music, but
today Madonna is just an
economic entity.)
Jameson sees
postmodernity in
negative terms; for example, postmodern
architecture is a product of "invisible"
capitalism and continuing need for
commodification. He says that loss of meaning in
postmodern
style means we lose our way, don't
know where we are and then become lost in
capitalism the same way as we would get lost in a
shopping mall.
Books by Frederic Jameson:
- 1961
- Sartre: The Origins of a Style
- 1971
- Marxism and Form: Twentieth
Century Dialectical Theories of Literature
- 1972
- The Prison-House of
Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian
Formalism
- 1979
- Fables of Agression:
Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist
- 1981
- The Political Unconscious:
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
- 1988
- The Ideologies of Theory,
Essays 1971-1986
- 1989
- Postmodernism and Cultural
Theories
- 1990
- Late Marxism: Adorno, or,
The Persistence of the Dialectic<
- Signatures of the
Visible
- 1991
- Postmodernism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
1992
The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema
and Space in the World System
1994
The Seeds of Time
1998
Brecht and Method
The Cultural Turn
sources: K.I.S.S. of the Panopticon ( http://carmen.artsci.washington.edu/panop/home.htm ) and Eddie Yeghiayan, University of California at Irvine Critical Theory Resource site ( http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~scctr/online.html )