Fredric Jameson: Art, Postmodernism, and Utopia

“Always historicize!” For over fifty years, the literary and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson has continued to revisit the relationship between history and cultural production. In stylish, erudite, and (in)famously intricate prose, Jameson engages with a wide range of interlocutors (from Raymond Chandler to Ursula Le Guin, Theodor Adorno to Ernst Bloch, György Lukács to George Lucas) and subjects (from the history of literary forms to theories of the modern and postmodern, architecture, cinema, science fiction, late capitalism, globalization, and the avant-garde). From this tapestry of referents emerge a handful of enduring preoccupations: What is the relationship between ideology, criticism, and cultural forms? What forms of social transformation are possible under the ever-more abstract, complex, and unrepresentable conditions and structures of contemporary capitalism? What is the political value of utopian thought?

In this course, we will read excerpts of major works from across Jameson’s career, among them Marxism and Form; The Political Unconscious; Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; Archaeologies of the Future; Allegory and Ideology; and Inventions of a Present. We will hone in on several key ideas–postmodernism, totality, ideology, utopia, and form–central to Jameson’s thought, and on account of which his work continues to provoke and challenge its readers. Special attention will be paid to the relationship between Jameson’s understanding of Marxist criticism and his own critical style. Readings will include selections from Jameson’s many intellectual influences and interlocutors, among them Adorno, Benjamin, Marx. We will also examine several of the cultural works that appear in his writing, including literature, visual arts, and architecture.