Fredric Jameson

Abstract

Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) is William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. After completing his doctorate at Yale, he taught at Harvard, Yale, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, before moving to Duke in 1985. His doctoral dissertation was published in 1961 as Sartre: The Origins of a Style. He has since published numerous books on literature, film, philosophy and cultural theory, including Marxism and Form (1971), The Prison- House of Language (1972), The Political Unconscious (1981), Signatures of the Visible (1990), Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), The Seeds of Time (1994), Brecht and Method (1998), Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005) and The Modernist Papers (2007). Fredric Jameson is among the most prominent theorists of postmodernism and one of the foremost Marxist critics of his generation. In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), film occupies a central place in his account of the formal features of postmodernism and in his analysis of the relationship of postmodern culture to the social and economic forms of “late capitalism”. In other works, such as Signatures of the Visible (1990) and The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), film is the focal point of his reflections on the fate of critical and utopian thought in postmodern culture, and of his evaluation of the possibilities and limits of various narrative and representational forms for imagining the place of individual experience in the new global system.