Jameson and Literature: The Novel, History, and Contemporary Reading Practices [1st ed.] 9783030548230, 9783030548247

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Jameson and Literature The Novel, History, and Contemporary Reading Practices Jarrad Cogle

Jameson and Literature

Jarrad Cogle

Jameson and Literature The Novel, History, and Contemporary Reading Practices

Jarrad Cogle Melbourne, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-54823-0 ISBN 978-3-030-54824-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54824-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © CSA Images/Getty Images, Image ID: 152405256 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

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Historical Contradictions: The Career, Critical Reception and Reading Practice of Fredric Jameson Major Contributions: Marxism, Symptomatic Reading and Postmodernism Jameson’s Longue Durée: Minor Works and Contemporary Approaches Reading Jameson Reading the Novel References Jameson and Nineteenth-Century Realism: Generic Boundaries, Historical Transformation and Affect Theory Realism, Marxism and the Canon Jameson’s Nineteenth-Century Canon: French Realism and Its Others Realism and the Problem of Genre: Melodrama, the Romance and Women’s Writing Realism and the Nineteenth Century: Transformation and Decoding The Antinomies of Realism, Everyday Experience and Narratives of Affect References

1 4 16 23 28

31 31 38 48 58 65 76

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CONTENTS

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Jameson and the High-Modernist Novel: Absence, Imperialism and Metacommentaries Usefully Ambiguous Modernism The Centre and the Periphery in Jameson’s High-Modernist Canon Metacommentary, Western Marxism and the Canonisation of High Modernism References

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Jameson and Post-war Literature: Postmodernism, Utopia and the Collective High Literature in Postmodernity Jameson and Genre Fiction: The Limits of Utopia Jameson and Contemporary Cultural Material: Textual Peripheries, Cognitive Maps and the Collective References Conclusion: Fredric Jameson, the Novel and Contemporary Reading Practices References

Index

79 79 91 103 111

115 117 132 145 156

159 169 171

CHAPTER 1

Historical Contradictions: The Career, Critical Reception and Reading Practice of Fredric Jameson

For decades now, scholars have described Fredric Jameson as one of the world’s leading cultural theorists. Sean Homer and Douglas Kellner go as far as to label him “the most important cultural critic writing today, the world’s major exponent of Critical Theory and the theorist of postmodernity” [1, p. xiii]. Despite the grand nature of this claim, it is a difficult one to quarrel with. Two of Jameson’s books—Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971) and The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981)— are landmark texts in the field of critical theory. Both made major contributions to the revival of Marxist theory within scholarly practice, particularly in the United States. The model for interpretation outlined in The Political Unconscious is a project of rare proportions and has become a primary example of the “symptomatic” reading practices that developed in the humanities across the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, Jameson’s essays on postmodernity and postmodern cultural material published in the 1980s—leading to the book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)—have become the standard point of engagement for many enquiries into the period. These various aspects of Jameson’s career have seen his work attain a significance seldom matched in contemporary criticism. At the same time, several factors offset this towering sense of Jameson’s status. In several areas of study, such as affect theory and postcolonial

© The Author(s) 2020 J. Cogle, Jameson and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54824-7_1

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studies, critics have consistently written against his work. In this manner, Jameson has often failed to infiltrate or shape the direction of academic thought, despite his well-noted influence. More recently, scholars have claimed that his major interventions within critical theory have come to ossify interpretive practice in certain ways. For example, over the last decade or so work on postmodern literature by Daniel Grausam, Amy Hungerford and Timothy Parrish has frequently defined its methods in contrast to Jamesonian types of analysis. Meanwhile, the sheer visibility of Jameson’s most famous texts has tended to overshadow other facets of his work. In books and essays that look closely at Jameson—such as Sean Homer’s Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism (2004) and Ian Buchanan’s Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (2006)—the focus often remains on The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, despite the wealth of material he has published across his career. This is attributable in part to Jameson’s more recent tendency to give his books a tighter focus: when compared to the bolder declarations made in The Political Unconscious and elsewhere, his later work has often had a narrower scope and intention. We should note, however, that across these later texts, Jameson has continued to redefine his oeuvre. While he only makes glancing references to the critical theory that has emerged in the last two decades, Jameson often speaks indirectly to earlier criticisms and subtly realigns itself with contemporary scholarly practice. Jameson’s theoretical frameworks continue to be much more influential and discussed than his readings of particular texts. For example, his extended readings of Joseph Conrad’s novels—which take up almost a quarter of The Political Unconscious —have not become foundational in the same way that the book’s model for interpretation has. Perhaps the most discussed of Jameson’s close readings are contained in his seminal essay “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984), where he discusses the Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles and paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Rene Magritte and Andy Warhol. In this manner, it has often seemed correct to consider Jameson a cultural studies figure, rather than a literary one. Sean Homer echoes several introductory passages when he mentions the “astonishing range of cultural analyses” Jameson has produced, and the breadth of cultural material he has discussed [2, p. 6]. Nevertheless, scholarly production has rarely concerned itself with this aspect of his career in any sustained manner. In monographs on Jameson, critics have often sought to consider the

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impact of his work and contextualise his major theoretical interventions within a wider sense of his career. Marxist scholars, such as Mathias Nilges and Cornel West, have understandably focused on Jameson’s reinterpretations of Hegel, Marx and Georg Lukács, at the expense of discussing a sense of the literary [3, 4]. In sceptical readings of Jameson (which often engage with his notions of totality and periodisation), critics have also concentrated on his theoretical frameworks. Nevertheless, several factors emphasise the central significance of literature to Jameson’s Marxist project. He trained primarily in French literature, and he has worked almost entirely within literature departments throughout his long career. Even in his most theoretically focused texts, such as Marxism and Form, he asserts a commitment to the field of literary studies (see 5, p. xi). Within this framework, despite extensive discussions of poetry, music, architecture and film, the novel has remained primary in his reading practice. My work will contend that Jameson’s idiosyncratic engagements with the literary canon—as well as his predilections and absences when discussing certain periods and forms—have an impact on his theoretical frameworks, particularly in his sense of historical change. If we make the concession that gaps are inevitable in any critical practice, several aspects of Jameson project nonetheless bring these questions of canonisation and textual choice to the fore: the immensity of his cultural knowledge and range of reference, his interest in generic boundaries and formulation, and his attempts to totalise and to make dialectic connections between disparate texts. By closely attending to Jameson’s literary readings, we also gain a new perspective on his overarching theoretical concepts, one that differs from many previous critical engagements. Through this work, this book seeks to articulate the tension between Jameson’s most influential work and the criticism that has surrounded it, while suggesting ways in which his literary interpretation might remain useful for contemporary reading practices. To recognise the specific nature and extent of Jameson’s engagement with literary studies, in other words, is not just to provide an account of his own literary criticism, but also to offer an alternative viewpoint of his cultural work as a whole.

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Major Contributions: Marxism, Symptomatic Reading and Postmodernism Biographical information on Jameson is hard to come by. Books focusing on his career have given only summary biographical details before concentrating on his theory and achievements. In the framing of his contributions to theory as paradigmatic or foundational, however, there is often a restricted sense of Jameson’s connection to wider critical discourse. In some ways, his own publications exacerbate this impression. His major texts often engage specifically with an earlier generation of Marxist critics, with only brief references to contemporary academic discussion. As Geoffrey Galt Harpham notes: “Jameson’s works … seem to issue from a center of consciousness unconnected with … any kind of neighborly community. His first books appeared starkly without dedicatees, and, with the exception of his very first, in which he thanked his dissertation advisor, without the customary list of friends and colleagues and institutions who made it all possible” [6, pp. 216–217]. The growing number of scholars mentioning Jameson in their own dedications and acknowledgements counteract this sense of the impersonal. Recently, former students have described Jameson as “a great teacher” [7, p. xiii], or as a dissertation advisor with a “voracious interest in everything, keen and attentive guidance, and general good mood” [8, p. 249]. For the contemporary reader without connections to the Program in Literature at Duke University, however, Jameson’s position within academic communities and contexts remains somewhat obscured. The summary of his career that follows will aim to place his work amongst the changing academic landscapes in which he has operated. Jameson was born in Cleveland in 1934, and he attended Haverford College, located just outside of Philadelphia, in the 1950s. He has attributed his interest in continental philosophy and diverse cultural materials to studying in the French department at this stage: It was a time when—in the ‘50s—English departments were not reading anything modern. At my college they didn’t even teach Joyce and Ulysses ; in French departments we were reading all kinds of new stuff…. I think what I was interested in was the link between literature and philosophy. For me, Sartre was such an example—both a philosopher and literary writer. That seemed to me a much more interesting way of putting together an

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intellectual field of thought than literary specializations that focus mainly on poetic texts. [9]

After this initial training, Jameson attended Yale, again working in the French department. He would complete his PhD in 1959, with his dissertation concentrating on Jean-Paul Sartre. Jameson would revise the work, publishing it as Sartre: The Origins of a Style in 1961. As Harpham notes, the foreword thanks his dissertation advisor Henri Peyre. Scholars have commented more often on a connection to Erich Auerbach, although Jameson describes him simply as his “teacher” in an interview with Ian Buchanan [10, p. 123]. In the same discussion, Jameson elaborates on how he thought of his own work in relation to Auerbach, before his thorough exploration of Marxist theory: “Instead of the New Criticism, I was really formed in … philology, in both French and German; style studies as it was called then, the work of people like Auerbach for example … where the relationship of the original text … to movements and historical contexts was a great deal closer … than the purely aesthetic appreciations of most English departments” [10, p. 123]. Origins of a Style is a consideration of Sartre’s literary production, and Jameson sees his fiction in terms of a modernist notion of style. In the text, Jameson claims, “a modern style is somehow in itself intelligible, above and beyond the limited meaning of the book written in it…. Such supplementary attention to style is itself a modern phenomenon: it has nothing to do with the purely rhetorical standards of elegance and epithet-weighing which dominated periods where all writers … owed allegiance to a single type of style” [11, p. vii]. While the book has become an outlier in discussions of Jameson’s career, predominantly due to the lack of a Marxist perspective, the focus on the change from realism to modernism aligns with much of his later work. In an afterword written in 1984 for its second edition, Jameson fluidly reframes his earlier arguments within a more contemporary sense of historical modes and critical theory. He claims the objective of the book was to “replace Sartre in literary history itself” and proceeds to tell the “story over again in what seems to me today a more satisfactory terminology” [11, p. 205]. There has been some work by Sean Homer and others that has pointed to ways in which the text remains important to our understanding of Jameson’s later output. For Homer, “it was precisely through the encounter with Sartre and the limitations of existential phenomenology that Jameson came to Marxism rather than through any break with Sartrean ideas as such” [12, p. 1].

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Over the next decade, Jameson would be employed at two major North American universities, firstly Harvard and then the University of California, San Diego. He would again work in French and comparative literature departments throughout this period. While continental philosophy had been a major influence on him up to this point, and he had encountered the writing of Georg Lukács as early as 1956 it would be at this stage that Jameson’s published work began to demonstrate a thorough immersion in Western Marxist theory [see 13, pp. 75–76]. Within this time frame, he produced several articles that signified this change of direction. These include “T. W. Adorno, or, Historical Tropes” (1967), “Walter Benjamin, or Nostalgia” (1970), and “The Case for Georg Lukács” (1970). After this run of essays, Jameson published three highly prominent texts across the next three decades: Marxism and Form (1971), The Political Unconscious (1981) and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). While he would generate a wide range of material in essays, books and collections across this period, critics have often summarised Jameson’s career and general influence by looking at these three works in particular. Marxism and Form is a thoroughgoing reappraisal of the work of key Western Marxists. In the text, Jameson argues for the importance of figures such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Lukács and Sartre to the field of literary theory. Here, Jameson traces an intellectual tradition largely ignored in the English-speaking world at the time of its publication, particularly within the United States. He describes the academic landscape at the time as such: “Marxist criticism has begun to make its presence felt upon the English-language horizon. This is what may be called … a relatively Hegelian kind of Marxism, which for the German countries may be traced back to Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness … while in France it may be … dated from the Hegel revival there during the … thirties” [5, p. ix]. While at this stage of his career he does not often reference New Criticism overtly, Jameson does reserve his harshest criticism for certain aspects of US academic practice, particularly “that mixture of political liberalism, empiricism, and logical positivism which we know as Anglo-American philosophy…. The bankruptcy of the liberal tradition is as plain on the philosophical level as it is on the political” [5, p. x]. For Jameson this bankruptcy is based in “The antispeculative bias of that tradition, its emphasis on the individual fact or item at the expense of the network of relationships in which that item may be embedded” [5, p. x]. In Marxism and Form, Jameson points to

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the increased attention that both English and North American universities were beginning to pay to French and German Marxist theorists of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, he is quick to remind the reader of the far more dominant tradition in North American academia, and he laments the lack of translations of key texts by Bloch, Lukács and others. His intervention is largely implicit, however, and he seldom mentions particular North American critics or schools of thought by name. Additionally, his survey of Western Marxists looks predominantly at work published before the late 1950s, and thus Jameson effectively negates a developed sense of contemporary engagement. Marxism and Form frames itself as an introduction to the major Western Marxists, but the text also serves as an outline for many of the key concepts that Jameson would develop in his own theoretical project. One of his chief critical imperatives—to “Always historicize!”—is already firmly in place in this early work, and he uses historical perspectives to complicate critiques of Marxism that were contemporary at the time. Thus, Hegel’s system of totality and the contemporary sense of its impossibility are “not proof of its intellectual limitations, its cumbersome methods and theological superstructure; on the contrary, it is a judgment on us and on the moment of history in which we live, and in which a vision of the totality of things is no longer possible” [5, p. 47]. It is here Jameson also begins his ongoing reframing of Lukács. Jameson expounds on the various stages of Lukács’ lengthy career, and he attempts to clarify numerous shifts in perspective and terminology. In Marxism and Form, Jameson accepts the validity of the various criticisms of Lukács, but also argues for the importance and usefulness of his theory: If … we set aside that part of Lukács’ work which constitutes a set of recommendations to the artist … we find that his analysis of modernism is based on a fundamental fact of modern art: namely, the observation of … an absolute difference between that literature which is ours, and which begun around the time of Baudelaire and Flaubert, and the classical literature that preceded it…. The advantage of Lukács over sympathetic theoreticians of the modern lies in the differentiating and profoundly comparative thought mode which is his. He is not inside the modern phenomenon. [5, pp. 198–199]

Jameson finishes the book by touching on some of the major theoretical ideas he will develop in later works: a return to dialectical criticism,

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his Marxist vision of the postmodern and a model for interpretation that seeks to uncover the politically repressed in terms of class struggles and oppression. Reviews of Marxism and Form reveal the singularity of Jameson’s work in the US academy at this stage. Ehrhard Bahr calls it “the most informative and lucid introduction to modern Marxist literary criticism which … exists today in the English language” [14, p. 180]. He also claims “no comparatist concerned with literary theory and criticism can afford to overlook this work” [14, p. 182]. Paul Piccone and Heinz D. Osterle similarly praised the originality of Jameson’s project in published reviews, but critics such as Israel Gerver are more suggestive of the resistance that Marxist theory faced in this period. Writing from a sociology perspective, Gerver finds “the insistence on the validity and respectability of Marxism as an intellectual mode is too shrill, and despite Jameson’s sophistication, his is an ultimately unsatisfying formulation of the sociology of literature” [15, p. 654]. In his conclusion, Gerver sceptically claims, “Others may feel that the weightiness of the Marxian framework lends significance to what most American sociologists regard as intellectually marginal” [15, p. 654]. Still, Marxism and Form stands as a ground-breaking text. Its publication signifies the beginning of an extensive incorporation of Marxist theory within North American criticism over the next three decades. The book raised Jameson’s profile substantially, in conjunction with another seminal essay, “Metacommentary” (1971). The article was published in PLMA, and—along with another contribution to the journal, “La Cousine Bette and Allegorical Realism” (1971)—it went on to win the William Riley Parker Prize of that year, awarded by the Modern Language Association. Jameson would publish his next major text, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972), soon after. With this body of work, he quickly established himself as a significant voice in critical theory at the time. A decade later, The Political Unconscious would eclipse this early success substantially. While Marxism and Form remains a key text for dedicated Marxist scholars and readers of Jameson, The Political Unconscious has had a wider impact on literary and cultural studies. With this publication, Jameson moved beyond predominantly reframing the historical reception of major theorists—as seen in both Marxism and Form and The Prison-House of Language—and began his own polemic work in earnest. In The Political Unconscious , he argues for “the priority of the

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political interpretation of literary texts” [16, p. 17]. He claims this intervention takes place in an environment where it is “increasingly clear that hermeneutic or interpretive activity has become one of the basic polemic targets of contemporary post-structuralism in France” [16, p. 21]. In the decade following Marxism and Form, the target of Jameson’s critique had shifted, with New Criticism giving way to poststructuralist and psychoanalytic reading practices in North American universities. He argues against the anti-interpretive tendencies found in the theory of Jacques Derrida and Susan Sontag in particular, while also working to problematise texts such as Roland Barthes’ S/ Z (1970). For Jameson, the historical, cultural and political are inextricably linked. He claims cultural senses of the signifier and signified are historically marked, and that Barthes’ perspective differs from that of the Balzac story he reads in S/ Z . As Jameson argues in “Metacommentary”, critics must acknowledge these differing historical positions. Furthermore, he states that no anti-interpretive act can escape hermeneutics entirely: “The ideal of an immanent analysis of a text, of a dismantling or deconstruction of its parts and a description of its functioning and malfunctioning amounts less to a wholesale nullification of all interpretive activity than to a demand for the construction of some new and more adequate, immanent or antitranscendent hermeneutic model” [16, p. 23]. With the extended opening chapter of The Political Unconscious , Jameson attempts to provide such a model. In doing so, he allows for the kind of “difference, flux, dissemination, and heterogeneity” argued for by Gilles Deleuze or Derrida, but he reasserts the importance of Marxist readings that speak to the social, political and historical [16, p. 23]. To do this, Jameson labours to reframe a number of Marxist concepts—such as mediation, totality, superstructure and mode of production—throughout the text. Importantly, he concedes that history “is fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational” [16, p. 82]. He will seek to move beyond this particular impasse, however, when he claims “history is inaccessible to us except in textual form, or in other words, that it can be approached only by way of prior (re)textualization” [16, p. 82]. For Jameson, the primacy of narrative in conceptions of history and the world at large is not binding theoretically; rather, it must be a consideration of any reading practice. Here, even as Jameson aligns himself with a poststructuralist attention to difference, he aims to subsume these theoretical standpoints into his Marxist project. His goal is always explicitly to reassert the presence of class struggle,

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false ideology, reification and modes of production within these varying frameworks. For Jameson, while history remains a heterogeneous mass, it is also the widest horizon to which interpretation and culture can speak. To work towards this horizon, Jameson argues the critic must begin with a structural analysis, borrowing from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ readings of myth, but also invested in the Lacanian notion of the symbolic. From there, the critic can locate the ideologeme, “the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourse of social classes” [16, p. 76]. Jameson reframes Lévi-Strauss’ sense that “the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real)” [17, p. 229]. In this regard, Jameson claims we can see the “symbolic act” in terms of competing class interests and take textual readings to the level of the social. Within this wider social purview, the critic is to see the text as a singular ideological message operating amongst multitudinous cultural discourses. Jameson then argues that interpretation may subsequently move onto the level of the historical. He thus sees these social forces in terms of modes of production as they evolve throughout history, whether as residual, dominant or emergent—terms he borrows from Raymond Williams. The remainder of The Political Unconscious sees Jameson putting his model to work. In the second chapter, he provides an overview of this method within the context of genre, looking specifically at romantic and melodramatic literary forms. Across the next three chapters, Jameson concentrates on a singular horizon, providing a more developed sense of his reading method. Within this work he also charts a historical progression, with each chapter focusing on a particular author and a subsequent period of the nineteenth century. In this manner, Jameson moves from Honoré de Balzac to George Gissing and then to Joseph Conrad. While the text engages with theorists such as Deleuze, Foucault and Sontag it is telling that Jameson’s most lengthy theoretical engagements are with Althusser’s chapter in Reading Capital (1965), Claude LeviStrauss’ Structural Anthropology (1958) and Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment. Once again, Jameson’s interaction with theory acknowledges a contemporary landscape, but looks to engage with earlier scholarly production. As Terry Eagleton notes: “The Political Unconscious , despite its dazzling range of allusion to contemporary thinkers … is far from a

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fashionable book.… Jameson boldly emerges as … a shamelessly unreconstructed Hegelian Marxist, for whom after all the Derridean dust has settled … History and Class Consciousness remains the definitive text” [18, p. 60]. In doing so, Eagleton perhaps understates the extent to which The Political Unconscious reframes Hegel, Lukács and Marx. Jameson’s commitment to older categories and ideas is a persistent tendency in his work, however, and adds to Evan Watkins’ sense of Jameson emerging “somehow already fashionably belated” [19, p. 17]. Despite this sense of belatedness, the text was hugely influential. Even more so than Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious was responsible for the restoration of Marxist theory as a powerful tool for cultural interpretation in North American universities. The book was not without its dissenters: despite Jameson’s careful work to frame notions of history, totality or periodisation within poststructuralist frameworks, many scholars remained sceptical of the text’s generalising and totalising tendencies. For example, Philip Goldstein points to the problematic aspects of Jameson’s approach, stating: Preserving the autonomy of [literary, political and economic] levels does not keep Jameson from affirming the transcendental status of his conceptual terms as well as his interpretive “frameworks.” While the poststructuralist denies that conceptual distinctions transcend the discursive network in which they are formed and embedded, Jameson assumes that theoretical terms like “class,” “value,” or “space” escape their disciplinary contexts and acquire a “transcendent” status allowing them to characterize a whole period or to determine political practices or social institutions. [20, p. 264]

This hesitancy towards Jameson’s interpretive frameworks is a common one and informs criticisms found in postmodernist theory, gender studies and postcolonial criticism, amongst other areas of scholarly production. The critique has persisted throughout Jameson’s career, as we will see below, and the issue will be discussed further in the chapters to follow. In the same period, Terry Eagleton would begin to write on Jameson, articulating a particular set of enthusiasms and concerns in two essays that remain highly referenced articles within discussions of Jameson’s work. In “The Idealism of American Criticism” (1981), Eagleton claims Jameson’s prose has an “intense libidinal charge, a burnished elegance and unruffled poise, which allows him to sustain a rhetorical lucidity through the most

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tortuous, intractable materials” [18, pp. 14–15]. Similarly, in “Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style” (1982), Eagleton declares, “for me, it is equally unimaginable that anyone could read Jameson’s own magisterial, busily metaphorical sentences without profound pleasure, and indeed I must acknowledge that I take a book of his from the shelf as often in place of poetry or fiction as of literary theory” [21, pp. 14–15]. Along with these kinds of assessment, however, Eagleton also frequently expresses a reservation about the efficacy of Jameson’s political project. In “The Idealism of American Criticism”, Eagleton famously states, “for the question irresistibly raised for the Marxist reader of Jameson is simply this: how is a Marxist-structuralist analysis of a minor novel of Balzac to help shake the foundations of capitalism?” [18, p. 65]. Another of Jameson’s contemporaries, Edward Said, adds to this discussion of political efficacy. In “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community” (1982), Said considers Jameson’s contribution to Marxist theory, the political possibilities of academic work, as well as Eagleton’s “The Idealism of American Criticism”. For Said, The Political Unconscious is “by any standard a major work of intellectual criticism”, but remains sceptical of its Marxist project [22, p. 146]. Said argues that The Political Unconscious contains an “unadmitted dichotomy between two kinds of ‘Politics’: (1) the politics defined by political theory from Hegel to Louis Althusser and Ernst Bloch; (2) the politics of struggle and power in the everyday world, which in the United States at least has been won, so to speak, by Reagan” [22, p. 147]. For Said, Jameson’s prioritising of political theory effectively means he focuses on the synchronic and teleological over the local, which Said doubts is tenable. Ultimately, Said asks, “how do quotidian politics and the struggle for power enter into the hermeneutic, if not by simple instruction from above or by passive osmosis?” [22, p. 147]. Alongside the claims that Jameson’s work totalises in a problematic fashion, this criticism of political efficacy has also remained a pertinent one across his career. In the years directly following The Political Unconscious , Jameson’s fame would reach a certain apex as he began to focus on the burgeoning field of postmodern studies. His intervention would take the form of several lectures and articles on the postmodern, some of which he would rework throughout the decade. Some of these smaller pieces would make their way into his definitive statement of the period, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In these works, Jameson interacts with the often-opposing views of early postmodern commentators,

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such as Jean Baudrillard, Jurgen Habermas, Ihab Hassan, Charles Jencks and Jean-François Lyotard. Many of these scholars, particularly Lyotard and Baudrillard, draw from poststructuralist concepts, even as they aim to describe new historical developments. As Jameson points out in his essay “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Debate” (1984), the debates amongst these scholars had at times concentrated on the aesthetic worth of postmodern cultural production—frequently in comparison with works of high modernism. With this article and others, Jameson aimed to shift the discussion. While he describes a familiar set of postmodern sensibilities, often similar to Baudrillard and Lyotard’s depictions, he also aims to tie these sensibilities to wider historical, economic and cultural frameworks. These two facets of Jameson’s writings on postmodernism delineate the differing receptions these articles have received. For example, in “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, he discusses the constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary “theory” and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose “schizophrenic” structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone—what I will call “intensities”—which can be best grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole new technology, which itself is a figure for a whole new economic world system. [23, p. 6]

In the essay, Jameson analyses a variety of cultural materials in terms of the features discussed above, and he discusses a sense of historical, spatial and temporal confusion for the Western postmodern subject. The components that Jameson describes, along with a number of catchphrases associated with this work—“the waning of affect”, “hyperspace”, “the hysterical sublime” and others—remain the more widely quoted elements of his essays on postmodernism. In this manner, his articles have become a primary source for critics referencing certain postmodern sensibilities. For another group of scholars, however, Jameson’s major contribution to postmodern studies remains his work to connect these aesthetic qualities to economic, social and historical change. In this regard, he reminds “the

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reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and terror” [23, p. 5]. The bulk of these essays focus on postmodern temporal and spatial confusion, however, and how this cultural situation is symptomatic of the obfuscation of global connections in a multinational capitalist system. Once again, we should note that Jameson’s work on postmodernism has been the subject of ongoing criticism. The collection Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique (1989) is a primary example, where questions of periodisation dominate the reactions to his early essays on postmodernity. As Douglas Kellner notes in his introduction: It is interesting here and elsewhere to observe the ways that Jameson’s effort to synthesize Marxism with poststructuralism and other competing modes of thought are criticized by both sides. Generally, poststructuralists and others claim that Jameson is guilty of excessively totalizing, subjectivizing, historicizing and of utilizing humanist and reductive modes of thought … while Marxist and other critics claim that Jameson goes too far in in the direction of dissolving and fragmenting subjectivity and in accepting postmodernism. [24, p. 39]

For example, in “Marxism and Resistance: Fredric Jameson and the Moment of Postmodernism”, David S. Gross summarises the major theoretical debates that Jameson is engaging with at this stage of his career. Predominantly discussing early postmodern essays such as “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate”, Gross delineates Jameson’s relationship to the liberal pluralism of North American academia in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to poststructuralists in the vein of Michel Foucault and Paul De Man. Gross focuses particularly on Jameson’s attacks on varying kinds of anti-historicist interpretation in both postmodern studies and poststructuralist theory. For Gross, this is the major contribution of Jameson’s postmodern essays. In sketching out the debates to which Jameson responds to, Gross also engages with the controversial role of totality in his frameworks, stating that “the totalizing practice in Jameson’s theory accommodates dialectically heterogeneity and différance (i.e., the rifts, gaps and aporias disclosed by deconstruction), but not at the expense that ‘it’s all connected’” [25, p. 98]. In

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this manner, Gross argues for the possibility of political agency within Jameson’s theory. We might contrast Gross’ response with Mike Featherstone’s “Postmodernism, Cultural Change, and Social Practice” from the same volume. In the essay, Featherstone is quick to remind the reader that “approaches like those of Jameson tend to regard history as the outcome of a particular relentless developmental logic and play down the role played by classes, social movements and groups in creating the preconditions for such a logic in their various power balances, interdependencies and struggles for hegemony” [26, p. 120]. Even as he recognises the often-raised problem “faced by those such as Lyotard who formulate the postmodern as the end of narratives is that they too require a metanarrative to explain the emergence of the postmodern”, Featherstone remains committed to breaking Jameson’s larger categories into contradictory components [26, p. 118]. Despite these criticisms, Jameson has remained committed to broader interpretations of history and culture in order to argue for the necessity of social change. Considering the type of interpretation recommended in The Political Unconscious , however, his politicised understanding of postmodern cultural production and social reality displays an increased doubt about the possibility of praxis, or for removing oneself from the cognitive dissonance created by late capitalism. This relationship between Western cultural material and the newly developing phase of capitalism— along with an associated alienation and reification—has come to define another kind of response to Jameson’s work on the postmodern. For example, Timothy Parrish describes a landscape in postmodern literary studies, one populated with readings that “helplessly iterate and perpetually enact Jameson’s concern that aesthetic creation and commodity production have become the same thing” [27, p. 646]. For scholarly production invested in postmodern cultural material, Jameson’s influential descriptions of late capitalism are often stifling in their pervasive influence. Within cultural studies, critics discussing the “post-postmodern” have found themselves in a similar position. Scholars such as Christian Moraru, Brian McHale, Robert L. McLaughlin and Jeffrey T. Nealon have remained thoroughly invested in Jameson’s portrayals of postmodernity, despite aiming to come to new and productive understandings of our current historical situation. The sense that a variety of scholars must work out from under Jameson’s articles on postmodernism betrays the enormous influence and visibility of his work in this area. Postmodernism would go on to win the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern

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Language Association in 1991. The original “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” article remains a widely taught and referenced text, even as the differing aspects of Jameson’s project remain in an uneasy state of flux in this reception. It is, by now (to echo Homer and Kellner) the paradigmatic piece of postmodern theory; it eclipses the work by Lyotard and Baudrillard to which it responds. The extent to which we can quantify this article’s contribution to the expansion of cultural studies as a field is perhaps limited, in a way that Marxism and Form’s impact on Marxist theory is not. Nevertheless, its totemic status in this particular moment of critical theory certainly speaks to a sizable influence across a number of areas of academia.

´ : Minor Jameson’s Longue Duree Works and Contemporary Approaches While these major texts are the most visible and significant moments in Jameson’s career, this portrayal is complicated by the extensive period he has worked over, the prolific output he has sustained throughout this time, and the variety of cultural materials he has discussed. In publications contemporaneous to his major texts, Jameson expresses a diverse set of interests. This is evident in less-discussed books such as The Prison-House of Language and Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979), and in a broad range of more specialist articles. In these more minor outputs, his focus ranges from Russian Formalism to twentieth-century detective fiction, and he is also less concerned with theoretical frameworks or grand statements. After the publication of Postmodernism, Jameson remained largely interested in postmodernity for the better part of a decade, but his publications in this period also involved the reading of a variety of cultural materials, such as architecture, detective narratives and peripheral global cinemas. As Jameson moved into the new century, his work continued to diversify. He published Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), a lengthy consideration of science fiction in relation to utopian theory, which also collected many of his early articles on the genre. Contemporaneously, he published two books on modernism: A Singular Modernity (2002) and The Modernist Papers (2007), the latter also collecting a broad range of earlier essays. From there, he would publish three texts focused on more theoretical concerns. Valences of the Dialectic (2009), The Hegel Variations (2010) and Representing Capital: A Commentary on Volume

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One (2011) would consider, respectively, of the history of dialectical theory, Hegel, and Marx. His interest in popular culture would also see Jameson produce articles on the television programme The Wire (2002– 2008) and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), amongst other topics. This work has not had the same sort of dramatic effect on critical theory and is of less concern for scholars commentating on Jameson. As Alexander Dunst noted in 2008, the same year Jameson won the Holberg Prize: To this day, critiques of Jameson are overshadowed by his writings on postmodernism leading up to the book of 1991. It can be taken as symptomatic that the most recent book-length engagement with Jameson, Ian Buchanan’s 2006 Fredric Jameson: Live Theory, essentially terminates its discussion of Jameson’s conception of a postmodern present with that volume, as do the introductions to the two essay collections on Jameson to have appeared in this decade. [28, p. 106]

This tendency can be seen in monographs such as Sean Homer’s Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism (1998) and Adam Robert’s Fredric Jameson (2000), alongside Buchanan’s text. These books are also typically sympathetic to their subject and often serve as an introduction to Jameson’s more complex theoretical ideas. Commonly, they see Jameson’s work as having a vast and largely positive influence, and only briefly deal with the major criticisms found in his reception. More recent monographs on Jameson, such as Robert T. Tally Jr.’s Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (2014) and Philip E. Wegner’s Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative (2014), provide more thorough engagements with Jameson’s later work, but remain in a similar mode. As such, these texts do not often point to the somewhat incongruous nature of Jameson’s work, remarked on by commentators such as Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Neil Lazarus and Evan Watkins. For example, Watkins speaks to the monolithic sense of Jameson’s arrival in the world of US academia (with the successive publications of Marxism and Form, The Prison-House of Language and “Metacommentary” over a short period). At the same time, however, Watkins paints Jameson as “somehow already fashionably belated, already [an] immense and impressive monument at which subsequent generations of student tour groups would have to be detained…. His influence

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has been distanced rather than inaugural like that of Derrida or Foucault” [19, p. 17]. Similarly, Lazarus claims Jameson’s “own interpretation of a particular phenomenon or text or tendency, while being duly and dutifully referenced in the subsequent scholarly literature, has never quite emerged as the representative one, the institutional standard” [29, p. 42]. Indeed, these opposing circumstances often mitigate Jameson’s imposing reputation. While postmodern studies, Marxist theory and literary studies more broadly have seen him as a pivotal figure, this has not always been in a positive manner. Despite the case for Jameson’s influence, rarely has his work become integral to major academic fields such as feminist theory, affect theory and postcolonial studies. Critics often cite his work in a superficial fashion, and elements of his output have long been averse to mainstream critical discourse. Furthermore, while scholars frequently describe Jameson as an eminent figure, tied to important moments in the history of critical theory, increasingly he is also seen as a distant but overbearing figure that needs to be cast off. Over the past decade a number of reading practices have asserted themselves in contrast to Jameson’s critical methodology. In 2012, Jed Esty and Colleen Lye discussed “recent methodological changes one might describe as a ‘new realist turn’ in criticism. Such a term would designate a range of disparate projects that register the lapsing of the linguistic or cultural turn that had once installed literary studies in the hub of interdisciplinary influence” [30, p. 276]. Of the wide-ranging changes to critical discourse that Esty and Lye denote, affect theory, surface or reparative reading practices, recent postmodern literary criticism, and the “neorealist turn” in postcolonial studies have often sought to move away from Jameson’s more famous contributions to scholarly production. In “Surface Reading: An Introduction” (2009)—the leading essay in a special issue of Representations, entitled “The Way We Read Now”—Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus make one of the most visible and decisive breaks from Jameson in this regard. In this work, Best and Marcus discuss the multidisciplinary tendencies in the humanities over the past several decades and claim: “One factor enabling exchanges between disciplines in the 1970s and 1980s was the acceptance of psychoanalysis and Marxism as metalanguages. It was not just any idea of interpretation that circulated … but a specific type that took meaning to be hidden, repressed, deep and in need of detection…. This ‘way’ of interpreting [was] ‘symptomatic reading’” [31, p. 1]. For Best and Marcus, while symptomatic reading has been a major component of critical interpretation for some

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time, The Political Unconscious was instrumental in the development of a variety of symptomatic reading practices: The influence of Jameson’s version of symptomatic reading can be felt in the centrality of two scholarly texts from the 1990s: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1991), which crystallized the emergent field of queer theory, and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which set forth an agenda for studying the structuring role of race in American literature. Both showed that one could read a text’s silences, gaps, style, tone, and imagery as symptoms of the queerness or race absent only apparently from its pages. [31, p. 6]

In contrast, Best and Marcus claim that the contributors to their special issue articulate “what alternatives to symptomatic reading currently shape their work, and how those alternatives might pose new ways of reading” [31, p. 3]. In a similar manner, Sedgwick equated Jameson’s interpretive methods with a “hermeneutics of suspicion”, a term originally coined by Paul Ricoeur. For Sedgwick: In the context of recent U. S. critical theory … where Marx, Nietzsche and Freud by themselves are taken as constituting a pretty sufficient genealogy for the mainstream of New Historicist, deconstructive, feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic criticism, to apply a hermeneutics of suspicion is, I believe, widely understood as a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities. [32, p. 125]1

Sedgwick also belonged to a group of affect theorists, including Lawrence Grossberg, Brian Massumi and Sianne Ngai, who have frequently criticised Jameson. As this new ambit of scholars has repurposed terminology and theory relation to affect, they have often discussed Jameson’s famous phrase used to describe postmodern subjectivity, that of the “waning of affect”. This work only briefly engages with Jameson, however, and does not often consider his broader discussions of affect found in Postmodernism or elsewhere. This common focus on either The Political Unconscious or Postmodernism as a point of departure—and the tendency to see the influence of Jameson’s work as restricting new scholarly production in certain ways—is often at the expense of acknowledging how his later production makes many shifts and amendments, or how it reframes many of

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his previous discussions. We should note that Jameson’s impersonal style often obscures these subtle revisions of his more famous texts. The glancing manner in which he references both contemporary theory and direct criticism also contributes to this situation. Nevertheless, scholars continue to ignore the importance of other interpretive methods to his wider oeuvre. While critics working on Jameson in detail have long accentuated the importance of dialectical thought to his interpretive practice, briefer engagements such as those discussed above often diminish this aspect of his work. A discussion of cognitive mapping is also absent in these wider criticisms of Jameson, a component of his thought that has developed significantly in the last two decades. In “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, he claims “The political form of postmodernism … will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as spatial scale” [23, p. 54]. For Jameson, space becomes the dominate problem of postmodernity— as opposed to the high-modernist focus on problems of time—due to the increasingly global and un-representable scale of multinational capitalist systems. Although he does not see an aesthetic practice of cognitive mapping yet existing, elsewhere his readings of realism, detective fiction, science fiction and certain cinematic examples offer parameters for this kind of operation. As Jameson’s career has progressed, notions of cognitive mapping have increasingly informed many of his readings of cultural material—whether in spatial, historical or conceptual terms. As Robert T. Tally Jr. has claimed, “although one might notice that Jameson never quite wrote a full-scale study of cognitive mapping per se, and that he tended to refrain from using the term itself as the Nineties wore on, the concept or project remained a key aspect of his cultural criticism during this period, and it has done so, arguably, throughout his entire career” [33, p. 100]. This is especially evident in newer material that reads contemporary literature and cinema in terms of an “aesthetic of singularity” [34, p. 304]. Jameson’s most significant publication in the last decade, The Antinomies of Realism (2013), works in this direction. Within the book, he focuses on the nineteenth-century realist novel to a degree not seen since The Political Unconscious , and he reads affect as an emergent category within the literature of the period. While notions of affect appear in several of his earlier essays, the text has an obvious relation to affect theory, a highly discussed area of contemporary scholarly production. Jameson claims, “I do not here mean to appropriate [affect] … nor do

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I mean to endorse or to correct the philosophies of which it currently constitutes a kind of signal or badge or group identity. Indeed, I want to specify a very local and restricted practical use of the term” [34, pp. 28–29]. Indeed, he only references theorists such as Sedgwick, Sylvan Tompkins and Rei Terada in passing. Jameson instead concentrates on the formal aspects of realism and describes a narrative whereby affect comes to infiltrate a growing number of aspects of the realist novel. At the same time, The Antinomies of Realism participates implicitly in the affect theory discussion, especially when considering Jameson’s history of oblique engagement with contemporary theory. Moreover, the text makes other concessions to the changing landscape of literary studies. Jameson reframes his sense of postmodern temporality by claiming “that the contemporary or postmodern ‘perpetual present’ is better characterized as a ‘reduction to the body,’ inasmuch as the body is all that remains in any tendential reduction of experience to the present as such” [34, p. 28]. He also moves away from the symptomatic style of reading criticised by Marcus, Sedgwick and others. The Antinomies of Realism is one of Jameson’s least politically focused works, with the text’s interest in historical development rarely concerned overtly with the political, paranoid or symptomatic. His oblique engagement with affect theory, his focus on realism and the reframing of his earlier terminology have given this work a renewed prominence after a series of publications with more specialised concerns. The Antinomies of Realism elicited special issues, symposiums and roundtables in response to its publication, and a body of work surrounding the text emerged in rapid fashion [see 35]. While the reception of The Antinomies of Realism denotes an increased impact in comparison with some of his other recent output, we can also see the book as exposing a number of tendencies already present in his work over the last decade—ones often ignored in the ongoing engagement with his more influential early texts. The sense that Jameson’s career should be re-evaluated, in a manner that pays attention to his wider body of work, seems pertinent in the contemporary context, especially as scholars seek to reassess or move away from his most famous contributions to interpretive practice. In order to better understand these varying shifts away from Jameson, this book will consider critical reception of his work as it has developed across his career. Despite the wide range of material that has focused on Jameson, rarely have scholars provided a sustained account of the criticism that surrounds him. As discussed above, many of the major

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books commenting on his career are sympathetic to their subject. Sceptical engagements often take the form of shorter essays and commonly constitute more local discussions of Jameson’s theory. In contrast, I will aim to provide an expanded account of Jameson’s position within critical theory as it has developed over several decades and to consider the major issues that scholars have raised in relation to his work. As discussed above, questions surrounding the political efficacy of Jameson’s project are of ongoing concern for a number of critics. The roles that notions of totality and periodisation have played in Jameson’s theory also continue to be of issue. Scholars have approached these concerns throughout the last three decades in a fluctuating manner and have done so across several areas of study. Here it is important to reiterate that, due to the length of his career, thinking about Jameson’s work requires us to historicise. Within this time frame, approaches to criticism and to canon formation have undergone significant changes. These developments in scholarly production inform contemporary discussions of Jameson’s most influential work, however, as well as the material he continues to produce. My work aims to establish the importance of literature to our perception of Jameson, but also to use this avenue of study in order to reassess his current position as theorist and critic. Inevitably, this work will encounter many of the same issues commonly discussed in relation to Jameson’s theory: questions of totality, of political efficacy, of empiricism, of generalisation and of periodisation. This literary focus will offer a new vantage point from which to consider Jameson, however, and discuss his theoretical principles in terms of his actual critical practice. This work will also accentuate a more complex view of his career and how it has developed, particularly across the last two decades. Here, we can connect Jameson’s work to a multitude of reading strategies as they continue to proliferate in contemporary criticism. This is in contrast to previous work that has sought to think about his relationship to earlier titans of Marxist enquiry or the significance of his theoretical interventions. For this book—even as Jameson’s stature is inevitably related to pivotal and important major works—the ongoing usefulness of his theory and interpretive methods will need to be traced in more local areas of interaction.

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Reading Jameson Reading the Novel Across his work, Jameson closely relates notions of literary style, genre and form to historical context. The interaction between mutations in cultural material and underlying economic change is fundamental to his reading practice and theoretical interventions. This book will organise its chapters around the major categories of literary production that Jameson discusses within three historical periods. These will include: the nineteenth century and the realism that he most commonly considers, predominantly French authors such as Balzac and Gustave Flaubert; the early twentieth century and the high modernism that Jameson focuses on in this era, seen in typically difficult writers such as James Joyce, but also in more conventional novels by E. M. Forster; the post-war period up until the present, where Jameson has discussed developments in the postmodern high-art novel, epitomised by the work of authors such as Pynchon and DeLillo, but also a number of generic fictions, primarily science fiction and detective novels. Each chapter will consider these literatures within the context of Jameson’s larger output and evolving career, seeking to provide a detailed representation of the subtly changing interests found across his remarkably cohesive body of work. As this concentration on period and specific genres or forms suggests, his literary engagement, while often providing close readings of texts, is predominantly interested in the development of the novel as it relates to the expansion of capitalism in the Western world. Authors who provide a highly particular formal example, one that they foster and explore throughout their careers, but who also denote a wider mutation in literary production, are often of particular interest to Jameson. His close readings—while frequently illuminating and multifaceted—commonly seek to frame particular novels within an author’s larger corpus and then extrapolate outwards to consider a literary form’s wider functions and how these relate to wider developments in history. My work will consider how such manoeuvres function within Jameson’s larger theoretical discussions. It will also contrast these more dominant literary categories with the cultural material against which Jameson defines his choices, which he consequently discounts or omits. In this regard, his constructions of varying genres—often through a discussion of what a particular literary form is capable of performing—inevitably hinge on notions of value. Here Jameson performs processes of canonisation and exclusion, despite his many claims to be uninterested in literary worth. These attributions of “possibility” influence his wider claims for the period

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and often combine a sense of literary value with a text’s potential for “cognitive mapping” operations, while also limiting the reading practices surrounding certain genres. This book will also compare these larger canonising gestures with Jameson’s casual comments about particular literary examples. Increasingly, in his writing and in less formal interviews, he makes numerous assessments of certain authors and novels. He often deploys these judgments with an ironic flourish and only tangentially relates them to his larger theoretical and political concerns. The chapter on realism will look at one of Jameson’s primary aesthetic concerns. The nineteenth century represents a particularly complex moment in the process of modernisation that, for Jameson, begins in the sixteenth century, and which he also refers to as the “bourgeois cultural revolution”. Here, the development of capitalism and reification in European contexts—particularly that of France—are reflected in mutations in the high realism that he favours. Jameson attributes a particular set of historical tendencies to the nineteenth century in his frequent return to considering the lineage of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola across this period. We can closely link Jameson’s interest in these specific authors to the influence the Western Marxists have had on his theoretical work. In this regard, Lukács in particular has greatly affected Jameson’s engagement with the nineteenth century, and the novels he has chosen to focus on. Within this work, Jameson considers notions of affect, primitive accumulation and subjectivity in relation to form. Often, he sees the increased reification of the social realm—as well as the development of the bourgeois subject—in terms of the changing forms and styles available to each author. In this chapter, I will consider Jameson’s early material and the French and comparative studies background from which his theoretical enquiries stem. I will then look closely at the historical, generic and formal classifications made in The Political Unconscious . The text focuses on European realism and the nineteenth-century romance, but also sees Joseph Conrad’s “proto-modernism” in relation to the earlier realist mode. Jameson explicates a fluid sense of how genres form and interact across the text, yet, in other remarks, inscribes stricter boundaries for the high realism he prefers. Here Jameson’s textual interests often contrast with the scholarly landscape he has influenced, which has often engaged with a more diversified sense of the century’s literature. In a similar manner, the chapter will also consider Jameson’s treatment of literature as reflective of complex historical tendencies, and the difficulty of

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manoeuvring between larger historical narratives and moments of specificity within this framework. The focus will then shift to The Antinomies of Realism and the ways in which the text offers a new perspective on his earlier sense of the century and the novel form. Within this discussion, I will consider how Jameson’s notions of affect relate to specific examples of affect theory in literary studies. The second chapter will concentrate on Jameson’s treatment of highmodernist literature. His work on this kind of cultural production is less prominent in several ways and often less cohesive in terms of its focus. Marxism and Form’s most concentrated readings of modernist cultural material focus on Ernest Hemingway and the composer Arnold Schoenberg, for example, with Hemingway rarely figuring in Jameson’s later portrayals of the period. Fables of Aggression purposely looks at the incongruous and controversial modernist Wyndham Lewis, and it has become one of Jameson’s least discussed books. Meanwhile, in influential texts such as The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism, modernism serves as a vanishing point for certain tendencies within both the nineteenth century and late capitalism. In his later book, A Singular Modernity, Jameson builds on the ambiguous nature of high modernism across his project, and he discusses several factors that contribute to the impossibility of defining the modernist period. Characteristically, however, he makes many brief summations of high-modernist literature. In sweeping descriptive passages found across the course of his career, he sees the changes in high modernism as a reflection of increasing capitalist influence, but also as a Utopian gesture in defiance of these larger structural progressions. Working through this fragmentary engagement with high modernism, I will consider Jameson’s common alignment of high modernism with singular, difficult and central figures such as Joyce and Marcel Proust. The chapter will also consider how literature relates to Jameson’s construction of the period in terms of industrial and economic developments, particularly in relation to hiss notion of “Fordism”. These larger and more restrictive descriptions of high modernism will be contrasted, however, with instances where the period and style have operated as a complex and heterogeneous site that refuses to be defined. Intriguingly, high modernism is also the site of much of Jameson’s interest in nation, empire and the postcolonial. The Modernist Papers , along with “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986), represents some of his major considerations of peripheral cultural material. In A Singular Modernity, he also considers the rise in discussions of global

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modernisms, although he argues against notions of alternate modernities and predominantly concentrates on developments in Western academia. The chapter will consider how Jameson’s work on high modernism might reconcile with a range of scholarly production considering global modernisms, “geomodernisms” or alternate modernities, but also ways in which he has written against common criticisms of generalisation, totalisation and imperialism levelled at his theory. The chapter on post-war literature will look at Jameson’s depiction of what he calls the “high-art novel” in the late capitalist period, as well as his treatment of generic forms such as the detective novel and science fiction. After spending the early stages of his career predominantly interested in the resolutely highbrow, he comes to find the formal developments as represented by Thomas Pynchon and E. L. Doctorow significantly limited in comparison with high modernism. For Jameson, the period is marked by an increasing reification of the literary field, and he finds the utopian gestures of the high modernists becoming increasingly impossible in postmodernity. Instead, he sees the literature as reflecting or even exacerbating the increased cognitive confusion of late capitalism. The chapter will look particularly at the manner by which Jameson restricts the novels of DeLillo, Doctorow and Pynchon conceptually. Jameson’s depictions of high-postmodern literature often deny a capacity to represent the historical or to map late capitalist reality. The chapter will contrast Jameson’s discussion of these novelists with his large body of work on science fiction authors, predominantly ones writing in the post-war period, such as Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin and Stanislaw Lem. Jameson sees this kind of fiction as offering a rare opportunity to consider our historical predicament in late capitalism. Similarly, he sees the novels of Raymond Chandler as providing cognitive maps of contemporary urban environments comparable to those of certain high-realist works. This chapter will concentrate on Jameson’s proclamation that the aesthetic value of postmodern cultural material is unimportant, even as he attributes expanded conceptual abilities to certain texts. In many ways, we can connect his treatment of these varying literatures with an increased pessimism found in his works of the 1980s and 1990s, with a somewhat dystopian view of postmodernity being heavily applied to its literature. This pessimism will be tempered somewhat with the publication of Archaeologies of the Future. In the text, Jameson argues for a renewed commitment to envisaging the future, despite noting the difficulties of this operation. This discussion will be augmented with a consideration of his more recent

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work, which has begun to see more opportunity in contemporary fiction, and to consider new representations of history and of global collectivity in cultural material. In this regard, the chapter will close with a discussion of Jameson’s current relationship with postcolonial studies, and how contemporary work on cosmopolitan literatures and peripheral realisms might reconcile with his later material. The book will conclude by discussing the wider tendencies found in Jameson’s novel reading practice across the previous chapters. In particular, this work will note the extent to which the novel form’s historical development affects Jameson’s larger conception of capitalist expansion, and how notions of formal possibility and his textual preferences have shaped his wider cultural theory. This discussion will foreground the way his work continues to shift, however, in both the elaborations of his more recent material, and in current understandings of his critical reception. The generation of academic heavyweights that preceded Jameson is now replaced by a more obviously heterogeneous set of ambits populating the fields of critical theory and literary studies. We can read his interpretive practice as an intersection of these two moments in scholarly production, and his personal sense of the canon—at times highly traditional and restrictive, at other times inclusive and progressive—mirrors this aspect of his career. In this manner, my work will present a unique view of Jameson, one that sits alongside appraisals that place him more firmly within a lineage of major Marxist theorists. At the same time, the conclusion will consider whether the more recent efforts to criticise his work have properly engaged with Jameson, beyond this more conventional view of his scholarly contributions. As Esty and Lye suggest, the move away from the linguistic turn has seen literary studies’ position within a larger academic landscape recede to some degree. As theorists move to consider affect, the cognitive and the surface in more detail, Jameson’s complex engagement with the literary may still offer opportunities for future production, in ways that scholars are yet to acknowledge.

Note 1. We can see Sedgwick’s move away from queer symptomatic reading over the course of her career towards “reparative” reading practices as a precursor to this later development in scholarly production.

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References 1. Homer, Sean, and Douglas Kellner. “Introduction.” In Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader, edited by Sean Homer and Douglas Kellner, xii–xxii. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 2. Homer, Sean. Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1998. 3. Nilges, Mathias. “Marxism and Form Now.” Mediations 24, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 66–89. Accessed May 25, 2020. http://www.mediationsjournal.org/ articles/marxism-and-form-now. 4. West, Cornel. “Fredric Jameson’s Marxist Hermeneutics.” Boundary 2 11, no. 1/2 (Autumn 1982–Winter 1983): 177–200. https://doi.org/10. 2307/303025. 5. Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. 6. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Late Jameson.” Review of The Seeds of Time, by Fredric Jameson. Salmagundi, no. 111 (Summer 1996): 213–232. Accessed May 23, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40536009. 7. Wegner, Phillip E. Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, The University, and the Desire for Narrative. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. 8. Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 9. Jameson, Fredric. “A Conversation with Fredric Jameson.” By Brian Contratto. The Chronicle: The Daily Independent at Duke University, February 8, 2012. Accessed May 25, 2020. https://www.dukechronicle. com/article/2012/02/conversation-fredric-jameson. 10. Buchanan, Ian. Fredric Jameson: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2006. 11. Jameson, Fredric. Sartre: The Origins of a Style. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. First published 1961 by Yale University Press. 12. Homer, Sean. “Sartrean Origins.” In Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader, edited by Sean Homer and Douglas Kellner, 1–21. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 13. Jameson, Fredric. “Interview by Eva L. Corredor.” In Lukács After Communism: Interviews with Contemporary Intellectuals, edited by Eva L. Corredor, 75–94. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997. 14. Bahr, Ehrhard. Review of Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, by Fredric Jameson. Contemporary Literature Studies 12, no. 2 (June 1975): 180–182. Accessed May 23, 2020 http://www.jstor. org/stable/40246163. 15. Gerver, Israel. Review of Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, by Fredric Jameson. Contemporary Sociology 2, no. 6 (November 1973): 653–654. Accessed May 23, 2020. www.jstor.org/sta ble/2062485.

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16. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen, 1981. 17. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. London: Allen Lane, 1968. 18. Eagleton, Terry. “The Idealism of American Criticism.” New Left Review 1, no. 127 (1981): 53–65. Accessed May 25, 2020. http://newleftreview.org/ I/127/terry-eagleton-the-idealism-of-american-criticism. 19. Watkins, Evan. “Generally Historicizing.” In On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalism, edited by Caren Irr and Ian Buchanan, 15–26. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 20. Goldstein, Philip. “The Politics of Jameson’s Literary Theory: A Critique.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner, 249–267. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 21. Eagleton, Terry. “Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style.” Diacritics 12, no. 3 (1982): 14–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/464940. 22. Said, Edward W. “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community.” In The Anti- Aesthetic: Essays on Popular Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 135–159. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. 23. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. 24. Kellner, Douglas. “Introduction: Jameson, Marxism, and Postmodernism.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner, 1–42. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 25. Gross, David S. “Marxism and Resistance: Fredric Jameson and the Moment of Postmodernism.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner, 96–116. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 26. Featherstone, Mike. “Postmodernism, Cultural Change, and Social Practice.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner, 117–138. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 27. Parrish, Timothy. “Tribal Politics and the Postmodern Product.” American Literary History 22, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 645–656. https://doi.org/10.1093/ alh/ajq036. 28. Dunst, Alexander. “Late Jameson, or, After the Eternity of the Present.” New Formations, no. 65 (Autumn 2008): 105–118. https://doi.org/10. 3898/newf.65.07.2008. 29. Lazarus, Neil. “Fredric Jameson on ‘Third-World Literature’: A Qualified Defence.” In Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader, edited by Sean Homer and Douglas Kellner, 42–61. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 30. Esty, Jed, and Colleen Lye. “Peripheral Realisms Now.” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 3 (September 2012): 269–288. https://doi.org/10. 1215/00267929-1631397.

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31. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1525/ rep.2009.108.1.1. 32. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 33. Tally Jr., Robert T. Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism. London: Pluto Press, 2014. 34. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. 35. Bennett, Bridget, Rachel Bowlby, Andrew Lawson, Mark Storey, Graham Thompson, and Fredric Jameson. “Roundtable. The Antinomies of Realism.” Journal of American Studies 48, no. 4 (2014): 1069–1086. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0021875814001376.

CHAPTER 2

Jameson and Nineteenth-Century Realism: Generic Boundaries, Historical Transformation and Affect Theory

Realism, Marxism and the Canon In discussions of Jameson’s work, critics have frequently cited Terry Eagleton. His early question in particular—“how is a Marxist-structuralist analysis of a minor novel of Balzac to help shake the foundations of capitalism?”—appears regularly in essays and books [1, p. 65]. The passage often serves to suggest a more general hesitancy towards Jameson’s political project, one that has persisted throughout his career [see 2, 3, 4]. While this particular exchange continues to shape our perception of Jameson, his explicit reply to Eagleton remains less discussed. In an interview published in the same period, Jameson claims: Balzac, of all writers, has a privileged and symbolic position in the traditional debates of Marxist aesthetics: so that to propose a new reading of Balzac is to modify those debates.… So one type of political consequence that emerges from work like this can be located within Marxism.… On another level, however, such studies of “classical” texts are to be taken … as an intervention in the standard university teaching of what is called the “canon.” So at this point the question opens up into the more general problem of Marxist pedagogy. [5, p. 72]

In The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson limits his political intent, deferring “that exploratory projection of what a vital and emergent political culture should be and do which Raymond Williams has rightly © The Author(s) 2020 J. Cogle, Jameson and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54824-7_2

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proposed as the most urgent task of a Marxist cultural criticism” [6, p. 10]. The response to Eagleton, however, reinforces the political valences of Jameson’s literary interpretations, along with the importance of realism to the Marxist theory that he inherits. He also emphasises the significance of the canon to his engagement with a wider field of literary studies. While the academic landscape has altered significantly throughout his career, it often seems that his view of the nineteenth century in particular has remained attached to “what [was] called the ‘canon’” during his early training. This training, predominantly within French and comparative departments in the 1950s, leaves him with a different set of interest than that of more recent literary theory. In this manner, Jameson’s sense of nineteenth-century literature reflects his contradictory position within contemporary scholarship. The work influenced by The Political Unconscious greatly restructured a sense of what the canon might include. Jameson’s portrayals of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, focus on a more restricted group of realist novels, in particular a French lineage that connects Honoré de Balzac with Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. This sense of nineteenth-century literature is especially evident in Jameson’s earliest texts. As later chapters will discuss, his modernist and postmodernist interests remain in flux throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast, he firmly establishes his realist interests from Marxism and Form (1971) onwards. Throughout the text, he regularly mentions Balzac, Flaubert and Leo Tolstoy. At this early stage of his career, Jameson predominantly aligns himself with Lukács’ sense of the historical development of the novel, and realism’s ability to map class structure or social totalities. He maintains a mediatory position throughout, however, and he complicates Lukács’ attribution of worth within the realist canon. For example, Jameson places Zola—along with high modernism—amidst a larger context of historical development: “It was Balzac’s historical luck to have witnessed, not the later, fully evolved and finished capitalism of Flaubert and Zola, but the very beginnings of capitalism in France; to have been contemporary with a social transformation … to have been able to apprehend social change as a network of individual stories” [7, p. 203]. While Jameson often refers to specific realist authors in these early texts, his primary focus is on theory and interpretation. In Marxism and Form, his discussions of realism take place predominantly in the context of Western Marxist theory. For example, he positions varying realist forms in parallel with Adorno’s readings of compositional music. In this fashion, Jameson compares Tolstoy’s historical position with that of

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Beethoven’s, and the formal qualities of the violin concerto with those of the bildungsroman. While the book provides a number of close readings, particularly of Ernest Hemingway, Jameson’s primary goal is to argue for the importance of figures such as Adorno and Lukács. In this manner, these theorists’ interests and their notions of literary aesthetics heavily influence Jameson’s early discussions of literature. A year later, in The Prison-House of Language (1972), Jameson shifted his focus to Russian formalism and French structuralism, as the latter moved into a position of importance in the North American academy. For Jameson, the aim of the book was to “clarify the relationships possible between the synchronic methods of Saussurean linguistics and the realities of time and history itself. Nowhere has such a relationship proved more paradoxical than in that realm of literary analysis in which the most tangible and lasting achievements of Formalism and Structuralism have been made” [8, p. x]. Of all Jameson’s early works, this book is the most hermetically concerned with theory. Yet, he remains interested in the disparities of the novelistic form in relation to the theories of the folk tale, short story and classical epic found in Vladimir Propp, Viktor Shklovsky and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Here, Jameson argues that the diachronic qualities of the novel resist certain synchronic structuralist analyses of other forms. He claims: Law depends in some sense upon synchrony; and we have seen how short stories or folk-tales have a kind of atemporal and object-like unity.… This is to say that where we can easily identify the non-story, that which fails to correspond to the intrinsic laws of the story as a form … the novel has no opposite in this sense, for it is not a genre like tragedy or comedy, like lyric or epic … and the novels which do exist in the world are not exemplars of some universal, but are related to each other according to a historical rather than a logical and analytical mode. [8, pp. 73–74]

The novelists that commonly appear throughout The Prison-House of Language remain figures such as Flaubert and Tolstoy, although an extended discussion of Dickens provides a rare early insight into Jameson’s sense of nineteenth-century English literature. As I will discuss in further detail below, Jameson reads Dickens’ Hard Times “not only because it is familiar and relatively short, but also and primarily because, as Dickens’ only didactic or ‘thesis’ novel, it involves an idea which has

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already been formulated for us by the author in terms of a binary opposition” [8, p. 167]. In this manner, Jameson’s discussion of Dickens places the author within a structuralist and synchronic framework of interpretation, one that limits Dickens’ novels in comparison with those of the French realists. Coming almost a decade after The Prison-House of Language, The Political Unconscious marks the culmination of Jameson’s early interest in realism. The book would provide his most intensive engagement with the nineteenth-century novel up to that point. Four chapters concentrate respectively on the romance novel of the nineteenth century, Balzac’s early high realism, George Gissing’s English naturalism, and Joseph Conrad—who, for Jameson, straddles late nineteenth-century forms and early modernist ones. As in his previous texts, Jameson’s discussion here is more theoretical in its intention. He poses his extended readings of the three literary figures as testing grounds for the interpretive method that he formulates in the opening chapter. In this manner, he argues against analysis looking primarily at modes of production that “tend toward a purely typological or classificatory operation, in which we are called upon to ‘decide’ such issues as whether Milton is to be read within a ‘precapitalist’ or a nascent capitalist context, and so forth” [6, p. 93]. In relation to his readings on Conrad, he argues that it would “be possible to posit some static homology … between the three levels of social reification, stylistic invention, and narrative or diegetic categories; but it seems more interesting to grasp the mutual relationships between these three dimensions of the text and its social subtext in the more active terms of production, projection … displacement and the like” [6, p. 44]. In this manner, Jameson argues for a less synchronic understanding of historical development, one that sees varying tensions in cultural material as reflective of a complex and fraught interaction between dominant, persistent and emergent historical tendencies. He argues for a heterogeneous model of history that acknowledges poststructuralist problems with metanarratives, and he works throughout the text to mediate between larger historical movements and the more specific and complex readings he performs in regard to specific novels. Nevertheless, in the reception of The Political Unconscious , certain prevailing criticisms of Jameson’s project begin to take form. Questions surrounding the totalising and periodising aspects of the book, in particular, arose in regard to the larger historical frameworks Jameson denotes [see 9, 10, 11].

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After publishing The Political Unconscious , Jameson focused heavily on postmodernity for well over a decade. In this time, he would continue to produce essays on modernist literature and science fiction, amongst other literary forms, but he produced very little material focused on classical realism. Nevertheless, the French figures of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola would remain common reference points for Jameson throughout the period. Over three decades after The Political Unconscious , The Antinomies of Realism (2013) stands as a late return to the nineteenthcentury realist novel for Jameson. Furthermore, the book is perhaps his most committed theoretical investigation of a literary genre—with wider notions of class, politics and reification relegated to the background. Jameson splits the work into two parts, the first constituting a sustained argument over the course of several chapters, and the second comprised of three longer chapters, which are predominantly self-contained. The overarching argument of the opening section sees classical or high realism as a tension between two narrative modes. The first narrative mode is one of an earlier storytelling tradition: folk tales, myth or the novel of the eighteenth century. Throughout, he uses the term “récit ” to describe this kind of narrative, which primarily focuses on plot and whose emotional content remains the larger categories of love, hate, happiness and so on. The second narrative mode is one more closely aligned with scene and description, and it is here that “affect” enters the literary for Jameson. Although he does not discuss modernism in detail in the book, the period can be seen as the moment where this narrative tendency has thoroughly replaced plot in terms of importance, as seen in his preferred example of high modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson discusses high realism as a tension between these two types of modes and reads the form as containing elements of both. For Jameson, this is why high realism is never a fixed form and has proven difficult to categorise. He sees varying kinds of realist novel as providing a series of formal solutions that are able to incorporate this kind of tension. He describes a situation in the nineteenth century where “the repertory of récits … is no longer so attractive in the longer … narrative forms, where the experience of the everyday has begun to assert its claims on … our attentions. The nineteenth century, indeed, may be characterised as the era of the triumph of everyday life, and of the hegemony of its categories everywhere, over … ‘extreme situations’” [12, p. 109]. It is in

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this context that affect emerges in literature and begins to alter the narrative temporality that Jameson calls “irrevocable time, of the event that has happened once and for all”, which is found in the récit [12, p. 21]. In the opening chapters of The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson again returns to discussing his preferred French realists, along with Tolstoy, but introduces a series of new major concerns. In this manner, George Eliot occupies a central position within the text, despite Jameson rarely mentioning her in his previous work. Eliot is the focus of issues relating to style indirect libre, providence and temporality, as well as serving as a problematic for his concepts relating to melodrama and nineteenth-century morality. Jameson sees Eliot’s invention of characters that function within the plot as villains—but are relatable and somewhat sympathetic figures— as one of the major developments in high realism’s move away from an earlier storytelling tradition. The second part of The Antinomies of Realism focuses on three varied topics. Jameson discusses representations of war in relation to generic forms of war narratives. He uses examples dating from the seventeenth century up until Alexander Kluge’s Chronik der Gefuhle (2004). Jameson also investigates the notion of providence in the realist novel across one of these chapters. George Eliot serves as the focus once again, with Jameson reading her novels in terms of inherited literary forms and their transformation in new historical contexts. In concentrating on The Antinomies of Realism and the essays that surround it, we can see an emergence late in Jameson’s career of a more nuanced depiction of realism. For instance, the text often provides literary readings that are more observant of the sense of heterogeneity and contradiction that he describes in The Political Unconscious , in comparison with some of his earlier material. At the same time, he also moves away from the symptomatic or paranoid reading practices that scholars have more recently criticised. The wider sense of the realist literature discussed within the text also demonstrates the extent to which his notions of nineteenth-century realism have moved away from mediating between differing Marxist and poststructuralist positions and begun to embrace a more varied sense of the formal qualities of the nineteenth-century novel. In his introduction to the book, Jameson surveys a series of engagements with the realist novel, notably discussing Mikhail Bakhtin, Lukács, and Ian Watt, amongst others. He goes on to claim: “Realism … is a hybrid concept, in which an epistemological claim (for knowledge or truth) masquerades as an aesthetic ideal.… If it is social truth … we want from realism, we will soon find that what we get is ideology.… If it is history we are looking

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for then we are at once confronted with questions about the uses of the past and even access to it” [12, pp. 5–6]. In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson’s dialectical reading practice comes to the fore, concentrating on the novel as a form situated within a complex host of cultural contexts. His work moves beyond the more structured accounts of realism found in Lukács in particular and remains more sceptical of realism’s ability to map the social in general. The following sections of this chapter will look at this development in Jameson’s career, using four distinct frameworks. Firstly, I will concentrate on the various canonising gestures Jameson performs in his engagement with nineteenth-century literature. His concentration on developments in the French realist novel frames the work of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola as paradigmatic examples, which, when placed in relation to each other, chart larger mutations in the novel form. In this work, Jameson diminishes the importance of the English novel in the nineteenth century in particular, often positioning the novels of Charles Dickens and George Gissing as followers of a more advanced French lineage. Secondly, and following on from this work, I will consider Jameson’s sense of nineteenth-century genre. While he commonly discusses a fluid notion of genre as an “ad hoc” construct—particularly in The Political Unconscious —his early work often seeks to demarcate strict boundaries in relation to realism. He frequently works to contrast realist formal qualities with that of the romance or melodrama, and in doing so constructs a number of generic boundaries. Within this discussion of genre, notions of gender will become prominent, particularly in regard to his work on the domestic novel. Jameson’s ambivalence towards the nineteenth-century English novel—and texts that are closer in form to the romance—result in a view of the period very much at odds with contemporary scholarship. For example, Jameson often concentrates on Flaubert in any discussion of the representation of women in nineteenth-century literature [see 12, pp. 147–148]. The Antinomies of Realism provides a corrective to some of these tendencies, although Jameson’s aversion to notions of identity politics produces a continuing tension in his discussions of novels focused on women’s experience. Thirdly, I will concentrate on notions of historical development. For Jameson, the Marxist symptomatic reading should discuss the complex developments of cultural tendencies and modes of production. Nevertheless, his larger historical narratives of the nineteenth century and its literature are often interested in far more linear and sweeping senses of development. While theorists have often attacked the

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concept of totality on poststructuralist terms, Jameson’s treatment of the nineteenth century suggests an incongruity inherent in his own rubric of interpretation. The chapter will explore how Jameson’s readings, which pay attention to multifaceted historical tensions and contradictions, are to be reconciled with the more straightforward historical narratives that he discusses at other moments. Finally, I will discuss The Antinomies of Realism in relation to affect theory. While we might see Jameson’s appropriation of the term as opportunistically timed, in a manner similar to his other major critical interventions, this chapter will conclude with an extended consideration of his history of using the term, particularly in relation to realism. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the discussion of realism and affect found in The Antinomies of Realism contributes to continued modifications to Jameson’s sense of cultural forms and their relationship to the political. Despite working to distance his text from other contemporary examples of affect theory, it remains that Jameson’s newer material has certain affinities with critics such as Jonathan Flatley and Sianne Ngai, particularly in relation to theories of collectivity and the everyday. In this regard, Jameson’s work on realism has the potential to take on new political valences, in a fashion that might provide a more visible answer to Eagleton’s early queries.

Jameson’s Nineteenth-Century Canon: French Realism and Its Others In his early career, Jameson often discusses the vast transformation of the Western world throughout the nineteenth century. He commonly depicts major alterations to the function of economics, subjectivity and culture across the period. For Jameson, the primary witness to this historical change is the novel, and he often works to relate its formal developments to wider historical or cultural contexts. He describes a process in The Political Unconscious , whereby broader readings of genre can ultimately “be transformed into the detection of a host of generic messages—some of them objectified survivals from older modes of cultural production, some anticipatory, but all together projecting a formal conjuncture through which the ‘conjuncture’ of coexisting modes of production at a given historical moment can be detected and allegorically articulated” [6, p. 99]. Within this rubric, texts perform a variety of functions. For example, Balzac’s novels express political desire, whereas Flaubert’s work describes the appearance of a bourgeois “affect” in reified domestic space.

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Yet, despite Jameson’s immense and varied proclamations for the period, his sense of its literature is noticeably restricted. The realist novel is commonly the only kind of nineteenth-century literature that he engages with at length, and his sense of the genre is decidedly limited. In particular, we can trace specific boundaries in his work in relation to both generic categorisation and national variations. Western Marxist theory influences Jameson’s engagement with the realist canon, along with his early training in French and comparative literature departments. While he references a small variety of realists, such as Tolstoy or Dickens, his focus inarguably remains on certain French authors. Beyond the strict focus on French realism, Jameson has consistently criticised the English tradition and has seldom worked on nineteenth-century American authors. He rarely mentions certain pivotal nineteenth-century figures, despite the proliferation of stray references across Jameson’s body of work. For example, his early texts do not comment on widely discussed authors such as Jane Austen, Herman Melville or George Eliot. Jameson predominantly excludes texts that we might conventionally define as romances or melodramas in particular. He has also seldom engaged with more specific generic forms found in the nineteenth century, such as the gothic tale or adventure novel. It should be noted that across Jameson’s career the category of realism is an important, overarching concept. Drawn from his engagement with Western Marxism, the notion of realism impacts on his understanding of cultural forms across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As many commentators have noted, Jameson’s work is remarkable in its consistency, its elaboration on key themes, and the recurring sense that—despite the breadth of material he covers—all aspects of his theoretical project are connected. Nevertheless, two major elements of Jameson’s theory actively work against the strict categorisation of the realist novel often found in his texts—as well as a sense that Jameson’s notion of realism has remained a constant, well-defined concept in his oeuvre. Firstly, he positions the realist novel as a hybrid literary mode. For Jameson, the realist novel borrows from a number of earlier narrative forms and these forms remain latent in the novel’s generic makeup. He repeats this notion on a number of occasions, particularly in The Political Unconscious and The Antinomies of Realism. As both texts demonstrate, the novel as a form and realism as a genre are in constant flux throughout the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Jameson attempts to see his paradigmatic French

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writers in closed realist terms, in a manner that contradicts his descriptions of generic boundaries as fluid or “ad hoc”. Secondly, Jameson has consistently attacked what he calls ethical criticism across his career. He has often symptomatically read the ethical and ideological motives behind theoretical frameworks, whereby “even the most innocently formalizing readings of the New Criticism have as their essential and ultimate function the propagation of [a] particular view of what history is” [6, p. 59]. Throughout this work, Jameson has also repeatedly denounced criticism that seeks to assign value to texts. While he has remained open about his own ideological imperatives—“to transcend the ‘ethical’ in the direction of the political and the collective”, for example—he has been less self-reflexive or transparent about the formation of his own canon, and the boundaries created by his specific focuses [6, p. 60]. Therefore, while often making bold proclamations about the period, or seeking to envisage historical totality, he has taken less time to consider what his specific view of the nineteenth century actively leaves out, or discounts. Jameson repeatedly returns to the works of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, and the authors often dominate his depictions of the nineteenth century. They are both the focus of either essays or extended passages, as well as being the figures most commonly referred to in Jameson’s more glancing interactions with the period. Frequently, he discusses the three in explicit relation to each other. In this manner, they form a narrative of stylistic development in literature that is hermetically French and realist (if we accept Jameson’s reframing of Zola, and of naturalism more generally). Jameson often positions this lineage in terms of the century’s modernisation. In Marxism and Form, he claims: In Balzac, factories do not exist as such: we watch not the end products but the efforts of the great capitalists and inventors to construct them.… But the only factory in the works of Flaubert is that pottery works which is but a passing stage in Arnoux’s checkered career.… When Zola, impatient with this massive lifelessness, tries to breathe vitality into it, he can only do so by recourse to myth and melodramatic violence. [7, p. 204]

This narrative will be repeated on a number of occasions, notably in essays such as “Imaginary and Symbolic in La Rabouilleuse” (1977) and “The Realist Floor-Plan” (1985), as well as The Political Unconscious . For Jameson, Balzac stands as the essential early instance of high realism: his fiction is partly immersed in older storytelling modes, but his literature

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predicts a more developed moment, which Jameson occasionally aligns with Dickens’ London novels. Balzac’s depictions of French history are an inherent component of Jameson’s interest in the author. In a reinterpretation of Lukács’ sense of the historical novel, Jameson argues, “Lukács is right about Balzac, but for the wrong reasons: not Balzac’s deeper sense of political and historical realities, but rather his incorrigible fantasy demands ultimately raise History itself over against him, as absent cause, as that on which desire comes to grief” [6, p. 183]. In this manner, Jameson positions a notion of historical, social and political mapping within a theory of the political unconscious. This manoeuvre allows for certain aspects of Lukács’ theory to remain relevant in an age of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic criticism that would otherwise question realism’s truth claims [see 13, pp. 141–148; 14, pp. 64–65]. Jameson is interested in Balzac’s realism, not just because of it produces a cohesive representation of social terrain, but because this mapping procedure “may be associated with [the] initial stockpiling of social and anecdotal raw material for processing and ultimate transformation into marketable, that is to say narratable, shapes and forms” [7, p. 10]. In a similar fashion, Jameson reframes Engels’ sense of Balzac giving us “a most wonderfully realistic history of French ‘society,’ describing, chronicle-fashion, almost year by year … the progressive inroads of the rising bourgeoisie upon the society of nobles” [15, p. 115]. For Jameson, the extended form of La Comédie humaine allows Balzac’s work to become “the model that now helps us to read the bewildering and massive substance of the real of which it began by being the projection” [7, p. 11]. These discussions accentuate Jameson’s varying interests in realism: Balzac is of significance because his realist aesthetics provide a wider purview of social formations, his lengthy career offers a particular historical perspective on capitalist developments in the nineteenth century, and the formal qualities and alterations of his novels align with the larger transformations in French society at the time. In Jameson’s discussions of Flaubert, his second example of realism, this work continues. For example, Jameson argues against Roland Barthes’ reading of “A Simple Soul” in “L’effet de réel ” (1968). In the essay, Barthes claims, “Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of ‘the real’ (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified; in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism” [13, p. 148]. For Jameson, however, critics

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should place these problems of language and realism’s truth claims within particular historical frameworks. He claims, “what is significant for us, even if the reference is to be taken to be a mirage, lies in the ‘reality of the appearance’ and the way in which belief in reference governs the practices of nineteenth-century daily life and of the nineteenth-century ‘realistic’ aesthetic” [16, p. 375]. As with Balzac, Jameson is less interested in Flaubert’s depiction of reality, but rather the further emergence of the bourgeois individual subject, as it has developed throughout capitalism up to that point. For Jameson, style indirect libre, and other elements of Flaubert’s impersonal style, will come to be associated with the reification of middle-class space, the older traditions’ subsequent emptying of content, and the appearance of affect as a major category in the realist novel. Jameson states that, “in Flaubert, Balzacian fantasy is effaced, its place taken by the … phenomena of bovarysme, that ‘desire to desire’ whose objects have become illusory images” [6, p. 184]. In “The Realist Floor-Plan”, the appearance of a musty smell in “A Simple Soul” signifies the emergence of affect. Affect, in this iteration at least, becomes a more ancient sensory perception that resists the reification of middleclass culture found elsewhere, actively reading against Barthes’ sense that realism is merely a self-conscious attempt to convey plausibility or detail. In Marxism and Form, Jameson will describe a similar narrative, “of an absolute difference between that literature which is ours, and which began around the time of Baudelaire and Flaubert, and the classical literature that preceded it” [7, p. 199]. While this narrative is qualified and complicated even as Jameson suggests it, the alienation of individual subjectivity in Flaubert’s writing is of major importance to Jameson’s sense of the development of realism. Jameson’s use for Zola, at least in the earlier parts of his career, is somewhat more marginal. The author remains an endpoint for Jameson’s narrative of nineteenth-century realism, whereby Zola’s varying formal strategies struggle to map or contain the social milieu he represents. Elsewhere, Jameson’s positioning of Zola as the successor to Balzac and Flaubert’s realist tradition works to reinstate the author, and naturalism in general, within the realist canon. Here, the argument is both with a traditional sense of French realism, but also with the theory of Lukács, who sees naturalism’s focus on description as an impoverishment of earlier realist qualities. Lukács states:

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Here we have … naturalism, in concentrated essence and in sharp opposition to the traditions of the old realism.… The tension of the old-type story, the co-operation and clashing of human beings who are both individuals and at the same time representatives of important class tendencies—all these are eliminated and their place is taken by “average” characters whose individual traits are accidents from the artistic point of view. [17, pp. 90–91]

In Marxism and Form’s placement of the French authors in a context of narrative possibility, Jameson begins his ongoing work to historicise Lukács’ theory of realism, particularly in relation to Zola: “For [Zola] the basic raw material [is] already established in advance … he has succumbed … to the mirage of some static, objective knowledge of society.… From Lukács’ point of view … this means that the novel … has ceased to become the privileged instrument of the analysis of reality and has been degraded to a mere illustration of a thesis” [7, pp. 194–195]. Lukács sees Zola’s aesthetic choices as preventing him from writing a productively Marxist literature and sees realism as continuing well into the twentieth century with the work of Thomas Mann. Jameson sees naturalism in terms of historical possibility, however, and he claims that Zola’s novels must negotiate and represent a moment of increased social reification. For Jameson, the increasing administered world of late nineteenth-century France provides a number of formal challenges, but he is also interested in placing Zola’s literature in relation to the coming divergence between high modernism and a degraded popular literature. In this capacity, the constrained formal strategies of naturalism have both an aesthetic and literary importance, but also a social one. In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson will continue in this vein, again writing against the sense that naturalism resides somewhat outside the realist canon. For Jameson, Zola’s “unrequited claim to stand amongst Lukács’ ‘great realists’ should not be shaken by his political opinions nor by his enthusiastic practice of melodrama … nor is the naturalism debate … relevant for our own purposes here, except insofar as it plays its part in contemporary literary tug-of-war” [12, p. 45]. Jameson devotes an entire chapter to describing the historical importance of Zola’s extensive descriptive passages within the context of affect in the nineteenth-century novel. The work to reinstate Zola into another stricter version of the canon, and the interest in these novelists in general, reinforces realism’s importance to Jameson as “traditionally in one form or another the central model

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of Marxist aesthetics as a narrative discourse which unites the experience of daily life with a properly cognitive, mapping, or well-nigh ‘scientific’ perspective” [6, p. 104]. As in the work of “The Realist Floor-Plan” to move past Barthes’ problematising of realism, Jameson seeks to maintain the traditional aspects of Marxist criticism, but remains aware of its difficult relationship with poststructuralist thought. Jameson, in his early career at least, is rarely interested in determining how realism operates as a kind of mirage, but rather in how that mirage reflects or even creates the subject’s experience of nineteenth-century consciousness and daily life. At the same time, while he often pays attention to these representational problems, it is usually in the service of moving beyond them. This commonly results in Jameson merely reinstating realism’s “nighscientific” ability to map the world around it, as seen in earlier Marxist theory. In Marxism and Form, Jameson will casually align his French lineage with the development of “Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne in the English novel” [7, p. 314]. There are a number of parallels between these examples—particularly their relationships to the French and Glorious Revolutions and the subsequent evolution of capitalism—but Jameson does not discuss the English authors any further. Indeed, he is less interested in the progression of the English novel throughout either the eighteenth or nineteenth century. For example, he casually refers to Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) on a number of occasions, but he has never seriously engaged with the text. Raymond Williams is a perhaps more intriguing example, given that he appears regularly in Jameson’s work, most often as a figure in which to borrow specific conceptual ideas and terminology from, such as “structure of feeling” [see 18, p. xiv]. Jameson cites Williams’ The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970) on several occasions in The Political Unconscious , but only briefly does Jameson discuss a sense of British history. At one point, he considers Conrad’s Lord Jim in terms of “the British empire, the heroic bureaucracy of imperial capitalism which takes that lesser, but sometimes even more heroic, bureaucracy of the officers of the merchant fleet as a figure for itself” [6, p. 265]. The discussion is cut short, however, and Jameson does not integrate notions of British imperialism into in his wider notions of capitalist development. Instead, he provides a lengthy citation of Williams in a footnote [see 6, p. 265n]. By contrasting Williams’ sense of Dickens with that of Jameson’s, it becomes clear that the historical perspective Jameson extends to the French canon does not appear in his treatment of English authors. For

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Williams, Dickens’ novels are a significant literary development, and they perform a similar type of mapping operation to the one Jameson describes in his readings of certain French novels. Williams also accentuates the formal developments found in Dickens, and he sees these components in larger historical contexts, particularly London’s growth throughout the nineteenth century: Dickens’s creation of a new kind of novel … can be directly related to what we must see as [a] double condition: the random and the systematic, the visible and the obscured, which is the true significance of the city, and especially at this period of the capital city, as a dominant social form. Dickens’s ultimate vision of London is then not to be illustrated by topography or local instance. It lies in the form of his novels: in their kind of narrative, in their method of characterisation, in their genius for typification. [19, p. 154]

Jameson reads Dickens in much simpler terms. He does not discuss Dickens’ narratives in terms of formal innovation, or their relationship to historical change, but in how they work through a number of more general cultural tendencies. Rather than representing certain social types in a Lukácsian sense, Dickens’ characters signify particular social values, similar to Vladimir Propp’s readings of folk stories. For example: In Hard Times we witness the confrontation of what amount to two antagonistic intellectual systems: Mr. Gradgrind’s utilitarianism (“Facts! Facts!”) and that world of anti-facts symbolized by Sissy Jupe and the circus, or in other words, imagination. The novel is primarily the education of the educator, the conversion of Mr. Gradgrind from his inhuman system to the opposing one. It is thus a series of lessons administered to Mr. Gradgrind, and we may sort these lessons into two groups and see them as the symbolic answers to two kinds of questions.… What happens when you negate or deny imagination? What would happen if, on the contrary, you negated facts? … The plot is nothing but an attempt … to work through the faulty solutions and unacceptable hypotheses until an adequate embodiment has been realized in terms of the narrative material. [8, p. 167]

Elsewhere, Dickens’ literary aesthetic or sense of narrative is seen in terms of the development of commercial style: “the ‘style’ of Dickens is if anything a form of packaging, a mannerism, an annoying or delightful

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‘supplement’ to those novel-products which it was his social role to furnish. But in modern times, it is clearly ‘style’ itself, or ‘world,’ or world-view, which the novelist supplies” [8, pp. 132–133]. For Jameson, Dickens anticipates the degraded popular fiction emerges in the early twentieth century. He further accentuates this notion in the essay “Imaginary and Symbolic in La Rabouilleuse”. Here, he sees the English author within the lineage of Balzac and Flaubert, in a discussion of Balzac’s character Philippe: “We can measure the transformation of the Balzacian figure into a stock villain by recalling the classic engravings that illustrate Dickens and Eugene Sue.… In the later writers—who may be considered … as an intermediate generation between Balzac and … Flaubert—such a character is … an ahistorical Other, a … caricatural representation of Evil” [20, pp. 63–64]. This reading treats Dickens as a figure who inherits the formal inventions of Balzac, but also as one whose characterisation of various social types returns to an older, ethical storytelling mode. The essay, atypical in a number of ways for Jameson, would appear in heavily modified form as the third chapter in The Political Unconscious , with Jameson removing the commentary on Dickens.1 He does not develop the connection between Dickens, Sue and other English realists and the French lineage further elsewhere. Furthermore, Jameson does not see Dickens in relation to a more crowded field of English authors, such as William Thackeray or George Eliot, or less central examples, such as Charlotte Brontë or Elizabeth Gaskell. The English canon perhaps does not have as clear a relationship to economic and stylistic development, and Jameson does little work to consider its lineage. Jameson’s short chapter on George Gissing in The Political Unconscious will be one of few moments where he places English authors in a wider historical context. Once again, however, he portrays Gissing and others as followers of a stronger French canon, which also doubles as a stronger narrative of development. The passage above from “Imaginary and Symbolic in La Rabouilleuse” is perhaps indicative of Jameson’s restricted use of Dickens, and many other English authors: the use of the term “ahistorical” is often a clear sign that these novels are not as productive for his Marxist analyses. In the essay, he describes how the “introduction of ethics into novelistic efforts to represent the disorders of early industrial society may … be understood as a repression of the historical … and one of the major strategies of bourgeois ideology in its effort to reconceptualize the social order … hence the profound affinity

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between Victorian ideology and the melodrama” [20, p. 64]. This treatment of Dickens obviously differs to Jameson’s reading of the French figures of Flaubert or Zola, whose particular voices are more often seen in terms of a refiguring of realist style and how it functions in relation to its subject matter, as well as the way in which they inherit a particular set of conventions from their predecessor. Jameson goes as far as to dismiss any sense of progression in English realism when he notes “the gestures and signals of the storyteller [are] perpetuated in the English novel well beyond 1857, the year Flaubert abolishes them with a single stroke in France” [6, pp. 154–155]. In the chapter on Gissing, Jameson describes the author as being thought of as “the most ‘French’ … of British Naturalists” [6, p. 186]. He sees Gissing predominantly in relation to the representative naturalism of Zola, although Jameson makes a number of concessions to Gissing’s position in an English tradition exemplified by Dickens. Here Jameson’s discussion of Dickensian narrative paradigms reinforces the sentimentality and melodrama of “the angel of the hearth” trope, and the problematics inherent in the Victorian novel’s interest in the lower class. In these moments, Jameson privileges the formal and stylistic developments of the French novel, over that of the English in particular. We might dispute this depiction of realism’s progression throughout the nineteenth century in several ways; however, of more importance to this book is the manner in which Jameson concentrates on texts that are at the forefront of literary or cultural development. While his model of historical change emphasises the persistence of older historical modes, he consistently disregards textual material that he describes as regressive in some fashion. His focus remains on novels that are the flashpoints for change, even as his sense of cultural progression accentuates a slower process of mediation and conflict. In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson’s focus broadens in a number of ways, with chapters on Spanish, Russian and English figures. Nevertheless, critics have noted the absences or exclusions that make their way into the text. In reply to a roundtable published in Journal of American Studies, Jameson notes, “this collection of Americanist responses to my book on realism demands what I take to be an autobiographical response, some explanation about the exclusion of American novels, something I’m always reluctant to give” [21, p. 1086]. In another rejoinder to a group of essays discussing The Antinomies of Realism in the nonsite.org journal, however, he elaborates on his national choices in more detail:

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Antinomies is not a monograph but a theoretical exercise or essay; and I’m rather proud of the way in which my exhibits touch in turn on all the major national languages in the Western realist tradition, from Russia to the U.S. (Dickens is implicitly touched on in the discussion of firstperson narrative, inasmuch as he was a kind of actor who essentially wrote scripts for his own performances.) But other exclusions … had a more practical point to them: The entire English tradition was omitted … as a pointed reminder that there are other languages and literatures … in the world and in history. I began with Zola in order to restore his always ambiguous reputation and his extraordinary achievement (it is after all the naturalist novel which was the great world-wide influence and not Balzac or Jane Austin or Goethe, however dear they may be to some of us); and I placed Galdós at the very center in order to deprovincialize our standard canon and to win a little more interest in this immense figure.… At any rate, the theoretical sketch I offered was not without its polemic digs and conspiratorial innuendoes. [22, pp. 102–103]

Jameson rarely acknowledges a sense of purpose in his textual focuses, or of “polemic digs and conspiratorial innuendoes”. Elsewhere, he has consistently sought to diminish the importance or considered nature of his literary interests. While he does discuss George Eliot at some length in The Antinomies of Realism, the text does provide an expansive sense of Western realist literature outside of the English tradition also. In this regard, it would seem that notions of genre, rather than nation, impinge more directly in Jameson’s sense of the realist canon.

Realism and the Problem of Genre: Melodrama, the Romance and Women’s Writing As the survey of French and English figures denotes, the more developed sense of historical and social mapping that Jameson finds in the works of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola privileges a more highbrow sense of realism and the nineteenth century in general. Jameson does not extend his focus to include literature that we might place in more populist generic boundaries, particularly that of the romance, or even the bildungsroman. Dickens seems to delineate a certain boundary for Jameson: the author represents a more melodramatic English tradition, but aspires to social realism in later works. Jameson rarely discusses romantic novels by figures such as Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë, even as they denote certain

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developments in the novel form. Jameson repeatedly sees the realist tradition in France as a lineage that clearly connects “the mature and original possibilities in the nineteenth century” with older narrative forms, as well as the high modernism of the early twentieth century [6, p. 151]. This sense of older cultural forms, and particularly an engagement with the eighteenth century, remains sporadic across his career. His discussions of earlier, more synchronic forms of literature are less developed, given that their relationship to historical change is less visible. In this manner, he has only briefly considered how English romances of the nineteenth century might differ to a more traditional iteration of this particular literary form. Often the earlier storytelling modes appear as simply “raw material”: less complex, pure narrative forms that are both indicative of a time before capitalist alienation, but also of little concern for Jameson’s sense of developing reification. Jameson does, however, have a recurring interest in Miguel de Cervantes. His positioning of Don Quixote (1605) in relation to other important precursors of the realist novel, such as Robinson Crusoe (1719), allows us some insight into how Jameson’s delineation between realism and romance functions. We can align his treatment of Don Quixote with his perennial continental focus and privileging of certain genres. While also seen in terms of its relationship to Lukács’ concept of abstract idealism, Jameson predominantly discusses the texts as an important stage for the novel’s development into high art. He claims, “reality is of course interiorized in the novel in the form of the romances and dreams of chivalry, so that the novel as a whole becomes not the unquestioned and degraded storytelling of these popular adventure stories, but a reflection on the very possibility of storytelling itself, a coming to self-consciousness of narration” [6, pp. 174–175]. This conceptual component attributed to Don Quixote reinforces a sense of realism’s self-reflexivity, at the same time as discounting forms of the romance that persist throughout the nineteenth century. Jameson further develops a sense of the realist novel as in opposition to the romance in The Political Unconscious , whereby, as various theories “of realism assert, and as the totemic ancestor of the novel, Don Quixote, emblematically demonstrates, that processing operation … called … realistic representation has as its historic function the systematic undermining and demystification, the secular ‘decoding’, of those preexisting … narrative paradigms which are its initial givens” [6, p. 152]. In this fashion, Jameson sees realism as a reworking earlier narrative forms and therefore can be differentiated from novels that remain

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committed to earlier generic modes. We can see his relative lack of interest in Robinson Crusoe as a starting point for the novel in terms of its more traditional appropriation of the romance narrative. In the rare instances he has discussed Robinson Crusoe, the conceptual valences allowed it are not comparable with Don Quixote. In “‘If I Can Find One Good City I Will Spare the Man’: Realism and Utopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy”, Jameson will contrast the science fiction novels with Robinson Crusoe. He finds Defoe’s work lacking a comparative ability to separate “the elements of human labor from the underlying conditions of Being itself”, limiting its possibility in Marxist terms [23, p. 402.] In these moments, despite maintaining that generic boundaries are fluid and “interminable”, Jameson privileges realist examples that have developed away from the romantic mode as much as possible. Nevertheless, this differentiation between realism and the romance often remains unspoken. Jameson does not often explicate the manner in which the boundary between the two operates. The major exception to this tendency is in The Political Unconscious , which features one chapter focusing on the romance at length. Here Jameson constructs a narrative of the genre’s development that delineates several turning points in its lengthy history. Nevertheless, this sense of categorisation will only become more slippery across the chapter: Is not … Manzoni’s great work, far from being a romance, rather one of the supreme embodiments of what we call the historical novel? … And are not Stendhal’s novels far more easily ranged under the more traditional notion of the Bildungsroman? All these uncertainties … are evidently generated by a “form”—the novel—which is not assimilable to either of the critical options of mode or of narrative structure. [6, p. 143]

We should note that, while Wuthering Heights (1847) appears as one of Jameson’s most visible examples of the romance in the nineteenth century in this chapter, the texts discussed remain predominantly continental. Jameson returns to Stendhal’s two major novels on several occasions, and he makes recurring references to Alessandro Manzoni, Joseph von Eichendorff, Alain Fournier, and Julien Gracq, amongst others. Brontë is the predominant example of the English tradition in the chapter, with Jameson making passing mentions of Sir Walter Scott and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928). Outside of this chapter, Stendhal is the only figure who Jameson will return to with any regularity across his various references to

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nineteenth-century literature. Even as he points out the incompatibility of strict generic categorisation, his nineteenth-century canon privileges realism in terms of aesthetics, political agency and its relationship with the historical. Through this focus, he manages to discuss nineteenthcentury literature in terms of complex formal and generic terms—in a way that speaks to poststructuralist notions of heterogeneity—but also maintains the strict sense of realist aesthetics found in Lukács. For Jameson, the French lineage is the strongest break from the ideologies of earlier storytelling modes. Curiously, it is within a framework of ethics that he will argue against the attribution of worth to cultural material, but also criticise certain literary forms. Jameson categorises the melodrama and the romance in negative terms, often through attributing these forms a sense of ethical values. He performs this operation by considering a traditional antinomy between good and evil within these forms. In The Political Unconscious , he constructs a narrative that charts the progression of the romance from Shakespeare up until the early twentieth century. He extrapolates from Northrop Frye’s discussions of the romance to claim, “romance is … a wish-fulfillment or Utopian fantasy which aims at the transfiguration of the world of everyday life in such a way as to restore the conditions of some lost Eden, or to anticipate a future realm from which the old mortality and imperfections will have been effaced” [6, p. 110]. For Jameson, the mutations in the romance form often align with alterations to the category of the villain. For example, he claims that the villain changes from an identifiable Other—whether racial, social or political— to one that resists identification or class coherence as society moves into the Feudal mode. In early capitalist society, this sense of ethics will change again, becoming, for Jameson, theological, psychological or metaphoric in its application. We can perhaps see George Eliot’s absence from Jameson’s realist canon up until The Antinomies of Realism in this light. Eliot’s inveterate moralising and use of metaphor to lecture her characters, along with her occasional use of melodramatic form, ensures Jameson’s lack of interest. Terry Eagleton discusses Jameson’s perennial exposure and denunciation of ethical or moral thought in his review of Archaeologies of the Future: Jameson is notoriously averse to moral thought, and vents his hostility to it at one point in this book. Ethics, in his opinion, is a simplistic opposition of good and evil, one which stands in for historical and political

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investigation.… Again and again in his work, he has set up this tattered straw man of ethical thought, partly to have the pleasure of bowling it over with a materialist flourish. He does not seem to grasp that moral language includes terms that this book uses in plenty, such as “beautiful,” “catastrophe,” “terrible” and “repellent.” It is hard to know why an anti-moralist should object to poverty or unemployment, or how he can explain in non-moral language why he finds the utopian impulse so precious. Does Jameson imagine that notions such as justice, freedom, solidarity and emancipation are non-moral? [24]

Even as Eagleton’s broad enquiry into Jameson’s sense of morality raises a number of problems for Marxist theory, traditional Marxist readings have repeatedly seen genres that reinforce this kind of value system as of dubious value. Jameson continues that kind of work here, once again following Lukács’ critical mode in particular. For example, Jameson instates a hierarchy of genre when he claims, “when, in something that looks like a tragedy, we encounter judgments of a more properly ethical type … the text in question is rather to be considered a melodrama, that is, a degraded form of romance” [6, p. 116]. We can further glimpse this sense of melodrama in a passage on Balzac: “Balzac … is premelodramatic, for at his particular stage in social history as well as in that of the development of the form, such ethical side-taking has not yet made its appearance, and we still have to do with something like an energy model, in which characters are ultimately weighed against each other in terms of their dynamism, whether for good or evil” [20, p. 64]. In this regard, Jameson’s categorisation of melodrama is idiosyncratically literary, and almost wholly concentrated on novels of the nineteenth century— despite melodrama’s historical ties to stage, musical performance and eighteenth-century forms. At the same time, it becomes apparent that within his various appeals to move away from ethical systems of thought, and particularly criticism that masks its deeper ethical tendencies, his criticism of particular genres has its own ideological or ethical imperative. In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson will encounter another set of difficulties related to melodrama in his treatment of George Eliot. Jameson once again engages with a notion of ethics in relation to melodrama, positioning Middlemarch as an illustrative example of how a “serious novel” is able to produce a villain. He poses this formal problem in terms of evil’s innate otherness: “the philosophical question par excellence, namely how my ‘good’ could ever be evil” [12, p. 116]. For the

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realist novel’s description of subjective interiority, this creates a difficulty in producing an antagonist in a more traditional sense. Jameson sees Eliot as developing from a writer of melodrama to one of high realism and he reads Romola’s antagonist Tito as a defining moment in this transition. Jameson discusses Tito’s complex motivations within the rubric of Sartre’s “mauvaise foi”, or bad faith: “The technical expression is borrowed from daily life and in particular from those disputes in which one of the interlocutors … produces one after the other reasons and demonstrations palpably in contradiction with one another for the sole purpose of winning the argument.… In Sartrean bad faith, this argument in interiorized” [12, p. 129]. The “crucial experiment” of Tito then reaches a more sophisticated level of characterisation in Middlemarch, whereby Casaubon and Bulstrode are seen as “former villains: and what they do and do not do for the plot in that status forms the supreme proof and example of that dissolution of melodrama I am arguing for, with all its results for the classic form of novelistic realism which it fulfils and undermines at one and the same time” [12, p. 130]. The manner in which Jameson sees Bulstrode’s motivations in particular as “moral laziness” allows for a manoeuvre away from the binary of good and evil. In this fashion, Eliot’s work is able to rise to the position of “serious novel”. Jameson argues that the conceptual nuances afforded the villains in Eliot’s Romola and Middlemarch free the realist novel from an older narrative concern of ethics—now the territory of a more degraded literary melodrama. He claims, “mauvaise foi exists in order to undermine the ethical binary and to discredit the metaphysical and moral ideologies of evil at the same time that the latter’s uses in plot formation and construction are replaced with at least some rough equivalent” [12, p. 137]. This discussion of a singular author, extrapolated in such a way as to represent a vast development in the nature of realism, may raise any number of questions, particularly in relation to notions of periodisation, literary production and history as a narrative construct. This particular narrative, however, seems predominantly essential only to the generic boundaries Jameson denotes between melodrama and high realism. Later in The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson will discuss Eliot’s Daniel Deronda in terms of this narrative: “The figure of Grandcourt … belongs unmistakably in the cast of characters of archetypal melodrama. Yet what can account for this remarkable formal regression on George Eliot’s part, in a work which otherwise in formal and stylistic energy and intelligence is in no way inferior to Middlemarch? Surprisingly enough, I believe the

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reasons are political” [12, p. 157]. With some difficulty, Jameson will frame Grandcourt within the context of Eliot’s own politics, an Enlightenment critique of the upper class, and the category of the gothic. The reader is ultimately to understand that the novel’s use of melodramatic tropes operates within a more complicated conceptual framework than Eliot’s earlier work. For Jameson, the novel is not a regression but an appropriation of an older melodramatic mode, becoming “a conjecture between the melodramatic denunciation of the persistence of the English ancien régime and the Utopian vision of another kind of organic community now set, not in the English past, but in some unfamiliar future landscape” [12, p. 159]. Jameson makes this argument in order to retain his earlier narrative of development in Eliot and the realist novel, but then abruptly returns to his own sense of genre as intrinsically fluid, seeing the majority of his examples—including his three paradigmatic French authors—in terms of persistent romantic or melodramatic elements built into the novel form itself. This is qualified in some sense, with Jameson claiming his argument has not been that realism means “the utter effacement of that manifestation of destiny and its récits which is the melodramatic mode: but only its weakening and tendential attenuation in the face of its opposite number, the scene, affect, the eternal present” [12, p. 160]. This remains in stark contrast to his strict treatment of the melodrama, along with the romance, across his career. Implicit in this treatment of romance and melodrama is a lack of interest in even more “degraded” genres. Jameson does not often discuss supernatural and gothic tales, along with the sensation novel. He casually remarks that science fiction is “conventionally assigned an inaugural date of 1895—Wells’ Time Machine—if not 1818—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”, but has never investigated the genre’s development over the nineteenth century [23, p. 57]. Considering Jameson’s ongoing work on the science fiction of the twentieth century, it is somewhat curious that he has rarely commented on earlier examples of the genre, or the antecedents found in gothic works like Frankenstein or The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), for example. This uncharacteristic lack of writing on the science fiction of the period reinforces Jameson’s strict focus on realism. While he privileges twentieth- and twenty-first-century science fiction and often theorises why it possesses Utopian and critical possibility, he has not often commented on whether earlier examples of the genre attain these kinds of qualities. For Jameson, the realist novel is at the pinnacle of cultural production at the time, and this situation

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ensures his predominant interest in the form. In reviews of The Antinomies of Realism, critics have claimed that there are opportunities for productive extensions of Jameson’s most suggestive ideas. For Robert Brazeau “when read for the coherence of its argument, [The Antinomies of Realism] sometimes seems unconvincing, overly strident, or, worse yet, polemical for the sake of being polemical; however, it offers an enviably broad range of references and models expert critical-reading strategies that scholars can redeploy in the context of their own work” [25, p. 876]. In discussing how other literary genres, such as the gothic novel, would fit into The Antinomies of Realism’s narrative of realism and affect, scholarly production may find further uses for Jameson’s text. Ironically, any effort to see a larger group of texts within this model of the novel’s construction must move beyond his own restrictive delineation of the canon. The question of gender in Jameson’s work becomes prominent in this consideration of genre. While not as regularly mentioned as some other critiques, feminist theorists have remained sceptical of Jameson’s treatment of gender. Elaine Showalter claims Jameson’s “political conscious, like his political unconscious, has been unabashedly phallocentric” [26, p. 118]. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sianne Ngai and Kathleen Martindale have also criticised Jameson’s reading practice as inherently male [see 27, pp. 123–151; 28, pp. 298–331; 3]. For example, Sianne Ngai compares Jameson’s paranoid readings with the Cold War espionage films he has discussed, along with the positions of their typically male heroes. Nevertheless, these feminist enquiries have not extended to a discussion of Jameson’s treatment of women writers and genres that are more interested in female experience and space. While prominent figures such as Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison are interesting exclusions from Jameson’s canon, the absence of women authors in his view of nineteenthcentury literature is especially noticeable, given their prominence in the period and the importance of feminine domestic space to many kinds of nineteenth-century novel. As evidenced in the proceeding discussion, Jameson’s French focus denotes a decreased interest in the English novel of the nineteenth century. His strict categorisation of realism also precludes any extended engagement with novels more aligned with the romance. In this fashion, his depiction of nineteenth-century literature seriously limits an inclusion of writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell or Mary Shelley, to name some prominent examples.

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Through these categorising operations, Jameson also restricts the importance of the “domestic” to notions of nineteenth-century experience, and nineteenth-century literature. As the blurb for the most recent edition of The Ideologies of Realism claims, Jameson’s work over the last forty years denotes “a shift from ideological analysis to the phenomenology of everyday life” [29]. His discussions of realism, however, continue to concentrate on the public and social spaces of the nineteenth-century everyday. When he does concentrate on the domestic, his primary example is that of Flaubert. Ngai claims that Jameson’s postmodern textual examples emphasise a particularly male understanding of contemporary social contexts, and his reading practice exemplifies a certain privileged and gendered kind of interpretive operation. Similarly, his insistence on a predominantly male group of novelists, ones who often aspire to an all-encompassing representation of Western capitalist society, and who concentrate on the external world of economics, law and trade, denotes another highly gendered understanding of nineteenth-century cultural material. Meanwhile, even as The Antinomies of Realism details a larger sense of the realist novel as containing its generic predecessors and rivals, and go some way to discussing at least one major nineteenthcentury woman writer, some absences remain intriguing. For example, there is a conspicuous lack of interest in Jane Austen within an ongoing discussion about style indirect libre.2 Once again, when considering this eschewal of gender, we might refer to his academic training at a point in time when the canon was much more restricted. We might also point, however, to a wider reluctance to include issues of identity in his theoretical project. This is in spite of the rise of fields such as postcolonial, queer and gender studies, all of which concentrate on issues of identity to some degree. Jameson has never directly responded to criticism of his treatment of gender by several highly prominent theorists. This aversion to politics of identity aligns with his muted response to the controversy surrounding his essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, and the accusations of an empiricist and othering ideology levelled at him, particularly by Aijaz Ahmad. Despite an interest in class as it has spread in a global context, this has not stretched to any discussion of the particularities of identity marked by different kinds of postcolonial history. This extends to an almost complete aversion to questions of race across his career. In his treatment of nineteenth-century literature, we might position the lack of discussion of racial identity in relation to

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his aversion to American literature, although he also avoids this question in his chapter on Conrad in The Political Unconscious . While the extremely limited discussion of race allows for only rudimentary commentary on its exclusion, Jameson has made a number of statements that belie a more obviously problematic approach to feminist discourse and to the notion of gender in nineteenth-century literature in particular. In The Political Unconscious , he claims, “The affirmation of radical feminism … that to annul the patriarchal is the most radical political act—insofar as it … subsumes more partial demands, such as the liberation from the commodity form—is thus perfectly consistent with an expanded Marxian framework, for which the transformation of our own dominant mode of production must be accompanied” [6, p. 100]. While Jameson aligns his model of the superstructure with feminist discourse, he rapidly folds a notion of class struggle based on gender into his own theory, and he rarely discusses this problematic again. In The Antinomies of Realism, he claims that “it is paradoxical and even a great contradiction that women figures … become the great stars of the nineteenth century novel … a situation in which the role of the adulteress becomes the negative or privative one of showing that there is no place for them in that bourgeois society whose representation was to have been the object of the novel in the first place!” [12, p. 148]. Yet, the book will remain uninterested in categories such as domestic fiction, or even female writers of the nineteenth century at large. Indeed, the two examples Jameson uses at this point are Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). Jameson often mentions Madame Bovary in his work; however, he usually discusses the novel in terms of Flaubert’s style, not in his depiction of the middle-class female. In “The Realist Floor-Plan”, when he does bring up the notion of female experience in the novel, Jameson is quick to return the discussion to more generalised notions of class. In this manner, he claims “a more ambitious study of the social investments of Flaubert’s libido—the privileged relationship between women’s experience, as in Madame Bovary itself, and the construction of narrative—would probably explain this affinity less in terms of sexuality than in terms of social marginalization” [16, p. 378]. Jameson’s treatment of Ursula Le Guin in his larger discussions of science fiction foreground an interest in feminist notions of utopia, and he persistently makes brief acknowledgement of gender issues. Nevertheless, Jameson’s comments elsewhere commonly work in a different direction. Even if we do not criticise his work in these specifically feminist

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terms, this discussion of gender points to ways in which the totalising, impersonal and distant elements of his practice do not acknowledge what texts, forms and tropes are left out because of subjective or contextual choices, or what is privileged in their place.

Realism and the Nineteenth Century: Transformation and Decoding As seen in the discussion of genre, Jameson’s early work closely connects the realism of the nineteenth century to the period’s economic and cultural development. Jameson often describes postmodern literature as lacking an ability to engage in the historical, while reading high-modernist novels as more aesthetically self-involved reactions to the political and economic. Realism, on the other hand, has a privileged relationship to the world it describes. Jameson’s descriptions of nineteenth-century capitalist growth can often be fragmentary and divergent, appearing in brief expository passages that describe the period as one of rapid and immense change. His treatment of literature, however, offers a more sustained and complex view of the century, one in which smaller historical moments are unpacked in conjunction with a text’s formal qualities. We can also understand the tension between these two facets of his project within the context of two dominant strands of his thought. In The Political Unconscious , he argues for a sense of historical change that is contradictory, which sees modes of production in conflict with each other, and he reads texts as being a witness to moments of “permanent social revolution”. At the same time, his narrative of reification, borrowed from Lukács, describes the spreading of capitalism across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this manner, the mode of production emerges as the catalyst for all recent historical development. Within this framework, Jameson describes a linear escalation of capitalist expansion, one that permeates increasing areas of cultural and subjective experience. While in more recent work Jameson makes a self-conscious move away from reification theory, the concept continues to dominate his theories of capitalism and define his periodisation of the nineteenth and twentieth century [see 30, p. 182]. However, when looking at how these two senses of the historical, both contradictory and linear, appear in his discussions of nineteenth-century realism, this element of his project becomes more multifaceted.

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Across Jameson’s body of work, the nineteenth-century canon is a witness to social change. This relationship is complicated by his need to engage with Barthes’ critique of realist representation, however, as seen in his discussions of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola. Jameson does not generally consider realism’s aesthetics, but rather its formal qualities. In turn, he links these changes in form to modifications in nineteenth-century economic activity, subjectivity and political ideologies. These kinds of readings figure prominently in his symptomatic work, particularly in The Political Unconscious . Here, for example, he sees Wuthering Heights ’ Heathcliff as “the locus of history in this romance: his mysterious fortune marks him as a protocapitalist.… The aging of Heathcliff then constitutes the narrative mechanism whereby the alien dynamism of capitalism is reconciled with the immemorial (and cyclical) time of the agricultural life of a country squiredom” [6, p. 128]. The mutations in realism in particular have a capacity to represent historical change, as best exemplified by his preferred lineage of French authors, but also in his other interests such as the Russian realist novel. Close readings of a text’s formal components, seen in the context of larger formal developments and a multitude of historical tendencies, are often at the centre of Jameson’s work on realism. For example, he articulates his sense of the nineteenth century as a larger period in his essay “The Realist Floor-Plan”. The essay rapidly evokes the development of realism, capitalism and dominant philosophical tendencies in the wake of the Enlightenment. Within this narrative, Jameson sees realism as the literary equivalent … of what Deleuze and Guattari … called “decoding”: the secularization of the older sacred codes, the systemic dissolution of the remaining traces of the hierarchical structures which very unequally and over many centuries characterized the organization of life and practices under the ancien régime and even more distantly under feudalism itself. The process is evidently at one with the whole philosophical programme of secularization and modernization projected by the Enlightenment philosophes, who thematize it essentially in terms of the defense of nascent science and the elimination of superstition or error, as well as the subversion of the older forms of theological power in the church and the monarchy. [16, p. 373]

Jameson repeats this narrative on several occasions, at a number of points in The Political Unconscious most notably, but also in Marxism and Form and essays such as “Modernism and Imperialism” (1990). In these

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moments, he characterises nineteenth-century literature in terms of its relationship to a developing capitalism, the reworking of older cultural modes and the retraining of human subjectivity. Criticism of Jameson’s work has often focused on periodisation and his tendency to generalise. As Evan Watkins asserts, “Jameson generalizes, inveterately and persistently”, and this component is problematic for a number of detractors [11, p. 17]. Haynes Horne describes Jameson’s periodising as remaining “squarely within the modern, the millenarian, manifesting the desire to represent as whole that which can only be known in shards” [31, p. 269]. R. Radhakrishnan claims, “Jameson merely asserts his bias when he argues for the anterior reality of the totality.… He thus negates the very possibility, epistemic, theoretical, and historical, of detotalized visions of accounting for reality” [32, p. 313]. In The Political Unconscious , however, Jameson asserts “history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious” [6, p. 34]. Horne argues against this conception of history because it is both nostalgic and involves notions of the meta-narrative disavowed by theorists such as Lyotard. For Jameson, however, narrativisation, generalisation and periodisation are problematic but unavoidable at the same time. He is also highly aware of the poststructuralist stance Horne and others have taken in response to his work. As Sean Homer has discussed, “Jameson’s theoretical wager was to present a version of Marxism which was at once open to the plurality of the new theoretical climate and at the same time able to maintain the priority of Marxist interpretation” [33, p. 38]. Indeed, in The Political Unconscious , he attempts to move outwards from this position, while still incorporating a number of poststructuralist ideas. For Jameson, history is decidedly non-linear, an absent cause and a totality we cannot perceive, yet we are confined within a series of linear narratives that are our only way of accessing history.3 While his sweeping depictions of the modernisation process remain disputed in criticisms of his work, Jameson’s language also works to complicate realism’s position within this narrative. He characteristically qualifies his portrayals of the nineteenth century in “The Realist FloorPlan” by framing them within a rubric of contingency in the opening sentence: “the hypothesis to be tested in the following essay is a conception of the moment of novelistic ‘realism’ as the literary equivalent …

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of what Deleuze and Guattari … call ‘decoding’” [16, p. 373]. Even if his assertions about the period, in this essay and elsewhere, appear in the text as unproblematic and somewhat factual, Jameson often warily inserts phrases that limit these claims to provisional sets of terms, point to their theoretical difficulties, or frames them as if they are generally agreed upon notions in a wider discourse about realism. This tendency increases substantially in his later material—particularly in A Singular Modernity, or The Antinomies of Realism—where these types of sub-clauses or qualifying statements achieve a kind of ironic humour. At the same time, this has often led to the sense that critics of Jameson commonly discuss his work in only partial terms, or disregard the more nuanced aspects of his arguments. In other instances, this historical narrative achieves a type of poststructuralist complexity through Jameson’s sense of superstructure and mode of production. For example, in The Political Unconscious he denies that analysis looking primarily at modes of production “will tend toward a purely typological or classificatory operation” [6, p. 93]. Instead, his discussion of modes of production describes a state of “permanent cultural revolution”, whereby the moment in which a new systemic dominant gains ascendency is … only the diachronic manifestation of a constant struggle for the perpetuation … of its dominance, a struggle which must continue throughout its life course, accompanied at all moments by the systemic … antagonism of those older and newer modes of production that resist assimilation or seek deliverance from it. [6, p. 97]

The readings of Joseph Conrad in The Political Unconscious set out to demonstrate this sense of history, with the author positioned between the two literary modes, and a multitude of historical tendencies. For Jameson, Conrad’s “place is still unstable … and his work unclassifiable, spilling out of high literature into light reading and romance.… In Conrad we can sense the emergence not merely of what will be contemporary modernism (itself now become a literary institution), but also, tangibly juxtaposed with it, of what will variously be called popular culture or mass culture” [6, p. 206]. Here, the romantic or melodramatic elements of Conrad are symptomatic of the movement from realism to modernism but also new mass-cultural forms. At the same time, this larger narrative incorporates several smaller cultural tendencies that complicate Conrad’s

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position. Jameson sees religion, labour, collectivity and the use of the sea as a strategy of containment as formal solutions to varying elements of Conrad’s narratives, but also as reactions to a variety of social factors. Conrad’s moment in history is one of a number of complexities, in terms of both the novel’s generic makeup and the development of capitalism, as well as the way in which the cultural relates to the economic. In these moments, Jameson accentuates the variability of these interactions. At the same time, the integration of this model with larger historical trajectories leads to a reinstatement of a linear narrative. At the base of Jameson’s reading of Conrad is a narrative of cultural degradation, whereby “the burden of our reading of Lord Jim has been to restore the whole socially concrete subtext of late nineteenth-century rationalization and reification of which this novel is so powerfully … the expression and the Utopian compensation alike” [6, p. 266]. The relationships Jameson describes between the nineteenth century and the following periods of modernism and late capitalism inscribe a narrative of increased fragmentation, one that progresses without much sign of the contradictory and antagonistic. Even if we find this narrative to be self-evident or predominantly true, Jameson leaves us with a number of interesting exclusions. For instance, he has only briefly mentioned Russia’s political context in discussing Tolstoy. Jameson goes as far as to diminish the importance of the socialist revolution in relation to his model for historical change. In Marxism and Form, he claims, “at the time of Balzac such forces are those of beginning capitalism, but the nature of the forces is not itself so important: for in another situation, Tolstoy’s literary vitality comes from the existence in Russian society of the rising class of peasantry … whose presence gives him a strength inaccessible to his Western contemporaries” [7, p. 204]. It is also curious that the insistence on the linear discounts varying political developments in nineteenth-century France. Jameson briefly states “one would be able to correlate the emotional content of Flaubert’s novels with the social and political climate of France after the failure of the Revolution of 1848” [6, p. 385]. Nevertheless, he does not see the works of Flaubert and Balzac in relation to these convoluted political upheavals. Instead, Jameson focuses on increasing industrial and economic development. This is in spite of the amount of material he has dedicated to his three major realist authors, or Lukacs’ sense that the “economic and cultural life of the entire nation was disrupted by the huge, rapidly successive changes of the period” [34,

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p. 24]. One exception remains in Jameson’s discussion of Balzac’s novel La Rabouilleuse: Philippe, capable of dealing with personal adversaries of his own stamp, is disarmed before the new and impersonal forces of nascent capitalism, and finds himself relieved of his fortune and worldly station … by the turn of events of July 1830, but above all, by the great banker-villains of the financial monarchy of Louis-Philippe: the Restoration will thus have been a transitional age between the personal energies of the Napoleonic era and the new financial power system of the July Monarchy. So it is that in one of those prophetic episodes in which Balzac’s novels are so rich, the former colonel of the Empire ends his life in a new kind of war, at the very frontier of a new kind of empire, during the campaign to seize Algeria from the Bey. [20, p. 65]

Here, Jameson once again avoids discussing the direct impingement of other modes of production on capitalism, as in the example of Tolstoy. Instead, the intensification of reification comes to dominate, and Jameson does not discuss tension between the French Revolution, the Restoration and the July Monarchy—which otherwise would seem to exemplify his notion of historical development as site of conflict and mediation. At the same time as he characterises the nineteenth century as one of immense change, Jameson instates a sense of “the everyday” as becoming the dominant category of both our literature and our experience of society. In The Antinomies of Realism, he claims, “the nineteenth century, indeed, may be characterized as the era of the triumph of everyday life, and of the hegemony of its categories everywhere, over the rarer and more exceptional moments of deeds and ‘extreme situations’” [12, p. 109]. In this regard, Conrad’s position between two modes of both literature and capitalism allows Jameson to give such a revelatory reading of the author’s historical position. For example, the reading of Gissing in The Political Unconscious does not have the amount of detail and complexity found in the later Conrad section, apparently due to the authors’ respective moments in history and the velocity of their change. As Jameson states at the beginning of his chapter on Conrad, “the paradigm of formal history which must now be presupposed is thus evidently more complex than the framework of a movement from Balzacian realism to high realism with which we have previously worked” [6, p. 207]. Here, the relationship between strong readings and Jameson’s “properly historical” methodology becomes difficult. In this manner, we

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might relate the fatigue that critics have expressed in regard to symptomatic reading with the possibility for new and engaging readings in this mode. While, for the committed Marxist, academic trends should not exhaust Jameson’s theoretical potential, one wonders how this model can continue to generate work perpetually, as Jameson exhorts when asserting his model for critique as pre-eminent in The Political Unconscious . In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson will go some way to absolve this problem. The text focuses on a linear narrative of development in the realist novel, across a somewhat limited time frame, and extrapolates one central thesis—that of the increasing dominance of affect in the novel—into a multitude of areas. For Jameson, the introduction of affect influences realism in terms of character systems, the function of description and symbolism, the nature of villains, and the level at which emotion is described and experienced. In focusing largely on formal development, he is able to display an overarching historical tendency, but also the many ways in which novels integrate this change. These considerations of form also allow Jameson to discuss other notions of transformation in the nineteenth century: consciousness, morality, and alienation, amongst others. His focus remains predominantly on development, however, and once he has positioned certain texts as crucial modulations to the novel’s form, he rarely discusses still existing, residual examples of those earlier tendencies. Jameson’s lengthy career has seen the theorist move through two differing historical periods himself. His training takes place in traditional comparative literature departments, while his early work is published in a period dominated by New Criticism. Jameson’s rise to prominence, on the other hand, takes place as another moment is starting to take hold, one highly indebted to poststructuralism, but also defined by a variety of theories of identity. While his readings of postmodern and even modern texts have often remained atypical, his relationship to realism is one more defined by that earlier academic mode and has seen his work retain certain traditional elements. At the same time, his parameters for discussing these texts have remained somewhat fluid. The Antinomies of Realism sees Jameson remain committed to select ideas of genre, subjectivity and reification, but also self-reflexive enough to allow these terms to shift and evolve. While his textual examples only differ in minor ways to his early, inherited sense of the canon, the ways in which these texts fit into a broader sense of the nineteenth century, and a growing sense of its literature, has widened significantly.

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The Antinomies of Realism, Everyday Experience and Narratives of Affect While we can point to The Antinomies of Realism’s increased nuance in terms of historical development and genre—two large categories throughout Jameson’s career—this book must also consider the emergence of a major new category within his literary engagement: that of affect. In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson traces “the two chronological end points of realism: its genealogy in storytelling and the tale, [and] its future dissolution in the literary representation of affect” [12, p. 10]. In doing so, he provides an overarching narrative for the development of the realist novel in the nineteenth century. For Jameson, the novel’s increased focus on representations of affect is intrinsically linked to modifications in the realist form. The novel becomes less interested in notions of plot and begins to concentrate on complex subjective experiences. In The Antinomies of Realism Jameson allows affect to remain fairly slippery, associating the term with “unnamed emotion”, “bodily sensation” or “intensities” [12, p. 44]. Most explicitly, he contrasts the novels of Balzac with those of Zola to delineate his sense of affect in the realist novel. Jameson claims, “In Balzac everything that looks like a physical sensation—a musty smell, a rancid taste, a greasy fabric—always means something, it is a sign or allegory of the moral or social status of a given character: decent poverty, squalor … the true nobility of the old aristocracy, and so on. In short, it is not really a sensation, it is already a meaning, an allegory” [12, p. 33]. In comparison, Jameson portrays Zola’s lengthy descriptive sections as representations of affect without any intended allegorical or symbolic intent. For Jameson, Zola’s work generates a “pullulation in which the simplicity of words and names is unsettled … by the visual multiplicity of the things themselves and the sensations that they press on the … observer.… The realm of the visual begins to separate from that of the verbal and conceptual and to float away in a new kind of autonomy. Precisely this autonomy will create the space for affect” [12, pp. 54–55]. Throughout The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson concentrates on this “space for affect” and the modifications to the realist novel that allow for this shift in focus. In one chapter, for example, he discusses the prevalence of the network novel—one that sees a shift towards secondary characters at the expense of central protagonists—and argues that this kind of formal mutation differentiates realism

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from earlier literary modes. For Jameson, the large casts of minor characters in works by George Eliot, Benito Pérez Galdós and others shift “the reader’s attention from the plotline to the immediacy of the characters’ encounters with each other” [12, p. 98]. In doing so, Jameson characterises the nineteenth-century novel as focused on bourgeois everyday life and moving away from “more exceptional moments of heroic deeds and ‘extreme situations’”. Jameson’s positioning of “affect” as central to The Antinomies of Realism is timely. Throughout his career, he has commonly pitched his work as an intervention in contemporary debates. The Political Unconscious , for example, engages with the poststructuralist theory that was gaining influence in the United States at the time. In doing so, Jameson made his argument for Marxist analysis more relevant to a broader academic audience. The book would have an enduring influence, particularly on symptomatic readings of literature, in the decades that followed. Similarly, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” works to connect the aesthetics of postmodernism with the historical development of late capitalism, claiming the social and economic changes in the period had a direct impact on is cultural forms. “Postmodernism” continues to influence scholarly discussion of both the late twentieth century and our contemporary moment. Jameson’s appropriation of affect in The Antinomies of Realism appears to be similarly shrewd, given the importance of affect theory in literary studies in the decade leading up to its publication. This sense is complicated, however, by Jameson’s work to distance his text from well-known examples of affect theory. He makes only glancing references to the area of study, describing affect as “a technical term which has been strongly associated with a number of recent theories which alternately appeal to Freud or to Deleuze” [12, p. 28]. Jameson mentions Sedgwick, Ngai and Flatley in a footnote, seeing them as somewhat illustrative of work in the area [see 12, p. 28n4]. He does not engage with them any further, however, instead claiming, “I want to specify a very local and restricted practical use of the term ‘affect’ here” [12, pp. 28–29]. Elsewhere he cites Teresa Brennan and Rei Terada, but only briefly. Even as he seeks to distance The Antinomies of Realism from this broader discussion, however, Jameson’s text inevitably reframes our understanding of affect theory as it provides a historical account of nineteenth-century literature that positions representations of affective experience as essential to its development.

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Jameson’s discussion of affect throughout his career also complicates this more recent use of the term. For example, in “The Realist Floor-Plan”, he discusses Flaubert while using similar concepts of the “everyday”. The article spends more time, however, connecting the standardisation of bourgeois life with broader structural change across the nineteenth century. Jameson outlines a new form of space, whose homogeneity abolishes the old heterogeneities of various forms of sacred space—transforming a whole world of qualities and libidinal intensities into the merely psychological experiences of what Descartes called “secondary sensations,” and setting in their place the grey world of quantity and extension, of the purely measurable—together with the substitution of the older forms of ritual, sacred or cyclical time by the new physical and measurable temporality of the clock and routine, of the working day. [16, p. 374]

The focus of the piece is Flaubert’s short story “A Simple Heart” (1877). As discussed above, the story is also the subject of Roland Barthes’ his well-known essay “L’effet de réel ”. Jameson allows Barthes’ point regarding the short story’s description of a bourgeois home and its construction of realism: “The house itself is a pretext, and in that sense Barthes was not wrong to isolate a detail from this paragraph as his central illusion for what he calls ‘l’effet de réel ,’ a purely connotative function in which a wealth of contingent details—without any symbolic meaning— emit the signal, ‘this is reality,’ or better still, ‘this is realism’” [16, p. 376]. Jameson nevertheless argues against Barthes by characterising the descriptive passages of “A Simple Heart” as engaging directly with the sense of reification as outlined above. Jameson claims that Flaubert’s story is unable to “recentre space, to stem the serial flight of infinite divisibility, to pull back the contents of the room into a genuine centered hierarchy” 16, p. 379]. Within this new sense of reified domestic space, a different kind of subjectivity emerges, one where affect becomes more dominant. Jameson emphasises the conclusion to the paragraph, which notes the room’s mustiness. For Jameson this is “the only concrete practice of perception still feebly surviving in a new odourless and qualityless universe.… This sudden … burst of ‘affect’ announces the fitful emergence of the subject in Flaubert’s text: the ‘musty smell’ inscribing … the place of subjectivity in a henceforth reified universe” [16, p. 380]. This discussion aligns very closely with The Antinomies of Realism, but makes

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an explicit connection between representations of bourgeois experience and the historical process of reification that overtakes both subjective experience and the domestic spaces we inhabit. In “Postmodernism”, Jameson also discusses the everyday and affect. Under late capitalism, he sees an increased sense of social and political inertness whereby everyday life has become an “eternal present”. In the essay, he also coins the well-known phrase “waning of affect”, claiming: The end of the bourgeois ego … brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego—what I have been calling the waning of affect.… This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings—which it may be better … following J.-F. Lyotard, to call “intensities”—are now free-floating and impersonal. [18, pp. 15–16]

Influential affect theorists have frequently commented on this phrase, including Lawrence Grossberg and Brian Massumi. In “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995), Massumi writes, “there seems to be a growing feeling within … theory that affect is central to an understanding of our … latecapitalist culture.… Fredric Jameson notwithstanding, belief has waned for many, but not affect. If anything, our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it. The problem is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect” [35, p. 88]. Massumi’s essay nevertheless contributes to this issue of vocabulary when he uses affect and intensities interchangeably. For example, in the essay Massumi states “for present purposes, intensity will be equated with affect” [35, p. 88]. He does not, however, acknowledge Jameson’s differing glossing of the terms in this context. Given the emphasis Jameson places on “intensities” in his depiction of postmodernity, Massumi’s comment seems somewhat misleading. Further to this, Massumi mentions the phrase “waning of affect” without engaging with the surrounding context Jameson is working within. Crucially, Jameson uses the term affect in “Postmodernism” in a different fashion to that commonly found in later affect theory. For example, Jameson references Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) to discuss affect. He states that the painting is “a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation … social fragmentation and isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety. It will be here read as an embodiment … of the expression of that kind of affect” [18, p. 11]. Further to this, Jameson

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makes the argument about a waning of affect in a broader discussion of affective investment in specific texts. He notes how audience engagement differs between a work like The Scream and something like Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes . He connects this changing relationship to cultural material to the “emotional ground-tone” of postmodernity. The brief discussion of affect found in “Postmodernism” also has a very different focus to the more specific conceptualisations found in Sedgwick’s influential essays. Collected in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003), Sedgwick’s early work on affect predominantly focuses on intersections of physical experience, cognition and psychology—as well as the complex interplay between subjectivity, performativity and culture. For example, Sedgwick focuses on the affect of shame and engages specifically with affect theorist Silvan Tompkins and psychologist Michael Franz Basch. Sedgwick claims “shame is the affect that mantles the threshold between introversion and extroversion, between absorption and theatricality, between performativity and—performativity” [27, p. 38]. She analyses both the fiction and theoretical work of Henry James through this particular lens, aiming to “offer some psychological, phenomenological, thematic density and motivation to what I [describe] … as the ‘torsions’ or aberrances between reference and performativity, or indeed between queerness and other ways of experiencing identity and desire” [27, p. 62]. In this work, Sedgwick mentions Jameson occasionally. Her criticism of “paranoid reading” implicitly includes Jameson’s famous directives for interpretation found in The Political Unconscious . The title of her famous essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You” notably references Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. Sedgwick’s essay places several interpretive practices in a broader trend of “hermeneutics of suspicion”. Within this framework, Jameson’s Marxist symptomatic readings of texts stand as definitive examples of this tendency. Sedgwick states that the imperative for a hermeneutics of suspicion had “taken on something of the sacred status as Fredric Jameson’s ‘Always historicize’.… Always historicize? What could have less to do with historicizing than the commanding, atemporal verb ‘always’? … The imperative framing will do funny things to a hermeneutics of suspicion” [27, p. 125]. In the essay, Sedgwick does not discuss Jameson at length, instead going on to focus on Judith Butler and D. A. Miller. Using Tompkins’ concept

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of paranoia as a “theory of negative affect”, Sedgwick analyses the wellknown interpretive practices of both scholars [27, p. 145]. In doing so, Sedgwick warns against paranoia’s “strong” or contagious qualities in critical work: “As strong theory … paranoia is nothing if not teachable. The powerfully ranging and reductive force of strong theory can make tautological thinking hard to identify even as it makes it compelling and near inevitable; the result is that both writers and readers can damagingly misrecognize whether and where real conceptual work is getting done” [27, p. 136]. This critique of hermeneutics of suspicion has had broad impact. For example, in Ugly Feelings, Ngai discusses the affect of paranoia and focuses on Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992). She argues that, in analysing 1970s conspiracy films, the text takes on a similarly paranoid world view, one that is necessarily male: “‘Conspiracy theory’ … becomes safeguarded through the genre of the political thriller as a distinctively male form of knowledge production. As Jameson himself suggests … the male conspiracy theorist seems to have become an exemplary model for the late twentieth-century theorist in general, and conspiracy theory a viable synecdoche for ‘theory’ itself” [28, p. 299]. We might align both Ngai and Sedgwick with a broader move towards “surface reading” within literary studies, which has often positioned itself in contrast to Jameson’s most influential work. While not often explicitly engaging with this kind of criticism, Jameson has commonly made subtle changes to his terminology or made efforts to reposition earlier work. In The Antinomies of Realism, for example, he discusses his earlier essays on postmodern experience, but shifts the focus to temporality. In doing so, he significantly revises his notion of a waning of affect: “the contemporary or postmodern ‘perpetual present’ is better characterized as a ‘reduction to the body,’ in as much as the body is all that remains in any tendential reduction of experience to the present as such.… The isolated body begins to know more global waves of generalized sensations, and it is these which … I will here call affect” [12, p. 28]. Even as he attempts to realign his use of terminology with broader discussions in affect theory, however, Jameson’s focus on temporality differentiates his work from much of the field. While he may use affect as shorthand for “unnamed emotion”, he is more interested in structures of perception in the bourgeois everyday. Throughout The Antinomies of Realism, he refers to Zola’s descriptions of sensory overload in crowded marketplaces, Tolstoy’s depictions of long-distance travel and its stream of stray thoughts and emotions, and Galdós’ interest in the fleeting

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impressions of acquaintances as they bump into each other in the urban environment. When discussing Tolstoy, Jameson concentrates on Prince Andrew’s interior experience as he travels across the country to meet a superior. He argues: What is thus crucial here is the changeability of the affects, which in turn provides the registering apparatus, the legibility of the various states.… What the chapter … demonstrates is the ceaseless variability from elation to hostility, from sympathy to generosity … finally to disappointment and indifference: there are in principle in Tolstoy no moments of the narrative which lack their dimension of affect … one is tempted to say that these movements and variations are themselves the narrative. [12, pp. 84–85]

While Sedgwick’s discussions of shame focus on specific structures of feeling, Jameson here concentrates on temporal components of affect, as well as the subjective and literary registering of these states. Throughout The Antinomies of Realism, he is most interested in the way affect becomes visible in the novel form and bourgeois experience more broadly. From this vantage point, we might view these two differing discussions of affect as more supplementary. Readings more interested in performativity or psychoanalytic frameworks might provide additional nuance to Jameson’s discussions of affect in the nineteenth-century novel. Similarly, Jameson’s notions of representation, subjectivity and the temporal rarely become the focus of work by Sedgwick and those she influenced, but these elements might work together to provide a more holistic picture of affective experience. This sense of affect’s emergence has particular relevance for work by both Flatley and Ngai. In Flatley’s Affective Mapping (2008) and Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, the political possibilities of affect are foregrounded throughout. In Affective Mapping, Flatley analyses polemic political texts. He articulates how both physical and emotional states can have specific political connotations—as well as how collectives can be formed through common feelings of depression or melancholy. For example, Flatley discusses W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and the Civil Rights movement, claiming: “The disclosure of the historicity of subjective emotional life always beckons toward a potentially political effect. Through the articulation of a subjective experience of loss with a collective one, the affective map facilitates the transformation of a depressive disengagement into an … interest in … social and political histories”

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[36, p. 106]. In doing so, Flatley claims that affect has the capacity to be politically productive. Ngai argues similarly for the potential of collective identities to be forged through shared affective experiences. Through discussing envy in the film Single White Female (1992), Ngai argues for the importance of “bad exemplarity”: “the film mobilizes envy to demonstrate the capacity of female subjects to form coalitions based on something other than ‘similar love for the same object,’ to emulate attributes without identifying with them, and to function as examples that do not properly exemplify, actively defining and redefining the category they would seem only to passively reflect” [28, p. 168]. Through reclaiming broad cultural understandings of envy, Ngai is able to provide a new model for collectivity and argues for its potential political effectiveness. For both Flatley and Ngai, collective experiences of affect offer strategies for productivity in a hegemonic and reified contemporary situation. This work might seem to sit in opposition to Jameson, who has seen affect as symptomatic of these same notions of hegemony and reification as they emerge and develop under capitalism. In certain later examples of his work, however, Jameson also engages with notions of collectivity that we might align with Flatley and Ngai. In “Symptoms of Theory, or Symptoms for Theory?” (2004), for example, Jameson outlines the development of critical theory and forecasts “a fourth moment for theory, as yet on the other side of the horizon. This one has to do with the theorizing of collective subjectivities, although, because it does not yet theoretically exist, all the words I can find for it are still the old-fashioned and discredited ones, such as the project of a social psychology” [37, p. 406]. Jameson has commonly referred to a notion of collectivity in his work on utopian thought. In Archaeologies of the Future, for example, he claims, “insofar as our own society has trained us to believe that true disalienation or authenticity only exists in the private or individual realm, it may well be this revelation of collective solidarity which is the freshest one and the most startlingly and overtly Utopian” [23, p. 230]. Jameson has also frequently concentrated on how cultural forms develop and perpetuate throughout history. In “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism” (1975), he notes the “essential portability of all literary language. So what we want to ask ourselves first and foremost is not whether the work of art is or is not autonomous, but rather, how it gets to be autonomous; how language … manages … to organize itself into relatively self-sufficient bodies of words which can then be

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grasped by groups and individuals” [30, p. 415]. As such, we might align Jameson’s work with Flatley’s notions of affective mapping. Similarly, we could argue that both Flatley and Ngai have begun the work of conceptualising the “collective subjectivities” that Jameson sees as necessary. These overlapping notions of collectivity, autonomy and portability all suggest possibilities for social change and for working against an over-determined sense of reification in late capitalism. If affect within this framework has the capacity to be both productive and limiting, then a more thorough delineation of affective experience and capitalist standardisation seems necessary. In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson refrains from discussing broader political contexts in any real depth. He predominantly moves away from symptomatic readings of nineteenth-century novel. This move is similar the slight changes to terminology regarding postmodernity and affect: he makes subtle manoeuvres that better align his work with contemporary discussion, but does not engage with criticism explicitly. He relates his analyses of the nineteenth-century novel with contemporaneous developments in western capitalism, but only in an indirect fashion. The scenes he chooses to reference from Tolstoy, Zola and others are often set in marketplaces or bureaucratic offices. Others take place in the kind of domestic environment that have lost a traditional sense of meaning, as discussed in “The Realist Floor-Plan”. This earlier essay connects the relationships between these differing elements of Jameson’s theoretical framework and The Antinomies of Realism’s focus on affect. As mentioned above, in “The Realist Floor-Plan” he relates Flaubert’s depictions of domestic interiors to the transformation of space under capitalism. Further to this, Jameson claims that novelists provide a key function in this process: “if we pause to interrogate the function of the writers and the artists of this transitional period.… The artists also are to be seen as ideologues … their service to ideology in the vastest sense of daily practices is … the production of a whole new world—on the level of the symbolic and imaginary” [16, pp. 373–374]. While Jameson’s discussion of realism might align with these broader notions of social and political development, he does not discuss these at length in The Antinomies of Realism. The text refrains from thoroughly articulating the relationship between changes to the form of the nineteenth-century novel and modernism’s reification of everyday experience. Jameson also

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steers away from discussing how the portability of the novel creates affective communities, and how these communities figure in that narrative of reification and standardisation. Flatley and Ngai occasionally mention broader historical contexts in their work on affect. They do not, however, discuss these contexts in detail. In Ugly Feelings, Ngai focuses on a diverse group of texts: alongside Single White Female, she discusses Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857) and Nella Larson’s Quicksand (1928). Early in the book, Ngai states she aims to present “a series of studies in the aesthetics of negative emotions, examining their politically ambiguous work in a range of cultural artifacts produced in … the fully ‘administered world’ of late modernity” [28, p. 1]. Nevertheless, she does not work to situate these varied texts in their historical moments, only briefly considering the connection between a fully administered everyday and the potential—or lack thereof—of certain affective experiences. In a similar fashion, Flatley argues that shared affective states can help to stimulate collective action. As mentioned above, Flatley outlines a history of African American political action by discussing the Sorrow Song, which has impact on both W. E. B. Du Bois and the later Civil Rights movement: because the singers know the songs will be repeated and because they know they will leave their traces in the songs, the songs afford them the ability to see themselves from the point of view of collective remembrance.… The songs … provide a nugget of affective experience for the audience, and then tell the audience how and why that experience is valuable, interesting, historically and politically relevant. This is the moment of what I have been calling affective mapping. [36, p. 153]

This work does not, however, consider a sense of political possibility. Flatley states that “the political potential of the affective map can lie nascent and unrealized in … aesthetic practice, waiting for an audience to take it up. The affective map must be met by the right circumstances for it to have actual galvanizing, transformative, collectively experienced effects” [36, p. 106]. Flatley does not expand further on the changing social, cultural or economic conditions that might allow for these affective communities to move towards collective action and be politically effective. Even if Flatley aims to avoid an account of this movement that is overdetermined, it remains that a thorough account of the historical situation in

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which the texts operate would add further nuance to his broader discussion. Through such an account, we may arrive at a stronger articulation of the relationship between the reified everyday and politically productive notions of affect. Throughout The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson resists connecting his historical view of affect in literature to a broader sense of cultural development. In doing so, he perhaps aims to avoid criticism that his work is overly dependent on paranoid or symptomatic analysis. If we refer back to “The Realist Floor-Plan”, however, we are provided with a framework for social and cultural change that integrates his sense of affect in the realist form. This framework provides an opportunity to broaden some of the narrow focus of The Antinomies of Realism, as well as some of Jameson’s other brief engagements with the term affect. Similarly, scholarly work that concentrates on the cultural, performative and cognitive aspects of affect could stand to engage with some elements of Jameson’s “local and restricted” sense of affect. He aims to delineate certain temporal aspects of subjectivity and consciousness, as well as underlying structures of perception, which could be complementary to affect theory that instead concentrates on structures of feeling. Work that aims to sketch affective maps in a more detailed and multifaceted fashion might gain from integrating these differing components of subjective experience. Meanwhile, the politically informed aspects of work by Flatley and Ngai would be enhanced by engaging with Jameson’s sense of an emergence of affect in literary history. In The Antinomies of Realism, it can seem that he purposely avoids contemporary critical discussion. Despite his imperative to distance the text from broader discussions in affect theory, however, Jameson’s work might productively engage with these discussions. While alterations to terminology and shifts in interpretive focus over the course of his career might require some unpacking, Jameson’s work provides a framework for understanding how affect emerges alongside capitalist reification of everyday experience— and whether affect has any capacity to combat this ongoing historical situation.

Notes 1. The article also contains work on psychoanalysis and Lacan that Jameson will excise in The Political Unconscious . Jameson wrote the article before the English translation of Deleuze and Guitarri’s Anti-Oedipus was published,

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which has a noticeable influence on Jameson’s book. It is possible that Jameson had read the original French publication by this time, but the text does not figure in this essay. While Jameson has since incorporated a number of psychoanalytic elements across his career, he has often done so in a partial or sceptical manner. 2. We can see Jameson’s insistence on the French terminology over “free indirect discourse” as reflecting his sense that Flaubert’s makes the most important contribution to this development in literature. 3. Critics such as Radhakrishnan have remained sceptical of Jameson’s attempts in this vein and of the ability of Marxist and poststructuralist theory to be reconciled in general. We can perhaps see the difference in terms of Jameson’s investment in the worth of macropolitics, while Radhakrishnan remains committed to a micropolitics of difference.

References 1. Eagleton, Terry. “The Idealism of American Criticism.” New Left Review 1, no. 127 (1981): 53–65. Accessed May 25, 2020. http://newleftreview.org/ I/127/terry-eagleton-the-idealism-of-american-criticism. 2. Huhn, Thomas. “The Postmodern Return, with a Vengeance, of Subjectivity.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner, 228–248. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 3. Martindale, Kathleen. “Jameson’s Critique of Ethical Criticism: A Deconstructed Marxist Feminist Response.” In Feminist Critical Negotiations, edited by Alice A. Parker and Elizabeth A. Meese, 33–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1992. 4. West, Cornel. “Fredric Jameson’s Marxist Hermeneutics.” boundary 2 11, no. 1/2 (Autumn 1982–Winter 1983): 177–200. https://doi.org/10. 2307/303025. 5. Jameson, Fredric. “Interview: Fredric Jameson.” By Leonard Green, Jonathan Culler and Richard Klein. Diacritics 12, no. 3 (1982): 72–91. https://doi.org/10.2307/464945. 6. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen, 1981. 7. Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. 8. Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. 9. Best, Steven. “Jameson, Totality, and the Poststructuralist Critique.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner, 333–368. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989.

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10. Goldstein, Philip. “The Politics of Jameson’s Literary Theory: A Critique.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner, 249–267. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 11. Watkins, Evan. “Generally Historicizing.” In On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalism, edited by Caren Irr and Ian Buchanan, 15–26. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 12. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. 13. Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 14. Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. London: The Athlone Press, 1981. 15. Engels, Frederick. “Letter to Margaret Harkness, Beginning of April 1888 (Draft).” In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Literature and Art: Documents on Marxist Aesthetics, edited by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, 114–116. St. Lois: Telos Press, 1973. 16. Jameson, Fredric. “The Realist Floor-Plan.” In On Signs, edited by Marshall Blonsky, 373–383. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. 17. Lukács, Georg. Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and Others. Translated by Edith Bone. London: Merlin, 1972. 18. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1991. 19. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973. 20. Jameson, Fredric. “Imaginary and Symbolic in La Rabouilleuse.” Social Science Information 16, no. 1 (1977): 59–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 053901847701600103. 21. Bennett, Bridget, Rachel Bowlby, Andrew Lawson, Mark Storey, Graham Thompson, and Fredric Jameson. “Roundtable. The Antinomies of Realism.” Journal of American Studies 48, no. 4 (2014): 1069–1086. https://doi. org/10.1017/s0021875814001376. 22. Jameson, Fredric. “Jameson Responds.” nonsite.org, no. 11 (Winter 2013– 2014): 102–103. Accessed May 25, 2020. http://nonsite.org/wp-content/ uploads/2015/08/nonsite_issue_11.pdf. 23. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. 24. Eagleton, Terry. “Making a Break.” Review of Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, by Fredric Jameson. London Review of Books 28, no. 5 (March 6, 2006). Accessed May 23, 2020. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n05/terry-eagleton/makinga-break.

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25. Brazeau, Robert. “Review of The Antinomies of Realism, by Fredric Jameson.” Modernism/Modernity 21, no. 3 (September 2014): 874–876. https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2014.0061. 26. Showalter, Elaine. “Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year.” In Men in Feminism, edited by Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, 116–132. New York: Methuen, 1987. 27. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 28. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 29. Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory. London: Verso, 2008. 30. Jameson, Fredric. The Modernist Papers. London: Verso, 2007. 31. Horne, Haynes. “Jameson’s Strategies of Containment.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner, 268–300. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 32. Radhakrishnan, R. “Poststructuralist Politics Towards a Theory of Coalition.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner, 301–332. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 33. Homer, Sean. Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1998. 34. Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin, 1962. 35. Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique, no. 31 (Autumn 1995): 83–109. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354446. 36. Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 37. Jameson, Fredric. “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?” Critical Enquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 403–408. https://doi.org/10.1086/ 421141.

CHAPTER 3

Jameson and the High-Modernist Novel: Absence, Imperialism and Metacommentaries

Usefully Ambiguous Modernism Nineteenth-century realism is a major focus for Jameson and emphasises the importance of the novel form to his theoretical project. The modernist literature of the early twentieth century, on the other hand, occupies a more uncertain position. In “Postmodern Jameson” (1989), Martin Donougho states that Jameson “never treats modernism directly…. Modernism is the absent center of his project” [1, p. 81]. This is true of the most visible material Jameson had produced at the time of Donougho’s writing. The Political Unconscious (1981), for example, describes literary and economic changes leading up to the early twentieth century, but its purview ends with the “emergent modernism” of Joseph Conrad. Jameson’s early material on postmodernism, meanwhile, only briefly attempts to describe the preceding historical moment, most famously in a reading of Vincent van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots (1887) [see 2, pp. 6–16]. The sense that modernism remains obscured in Jameson’s treatment of literary history persists in his later work, as well as in contemporary critical attention. Philip E. Wegner has more recently claimed: “both the central object and the very condition of possibility of his research agenda, [modernism] vanishes when we attempt to bring it to the center of our intellectual attention” [3, p. 254]. In The Antinomies of Realism (2013), meanwhile, Jameson posits high modernism as an end point for his historical narrative—the moment in literature’s development

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where representations of affect become dominant over earlier storytelling impulses—but avoids describing the situation in detail. Such a portrayal of Jameson is complicated, however, by overt considerations of modernism found in works such as Fables of Aggression (1979), A Singular Modernity (2002) and The Modernist Papers (2007). As the collected essays in The Modernist Papers attest, he has discussed modernist authors, poets and painters throughout his career, particularly across the 1980s and 1990s. Nevertheless, in comparison with Jameson’s most influential work, this material on the modern has had a consistently minor impact. Fables of Aggression, for example, “remains the only one of Jameson’s books to be out of print for any extended period” and is often overlooked by scholars [4, p. 185]. Similarly, pieces such as “Ulysses in History” (1982) have appeared in less visible avenues than Jameson’s contemporaneous essays on postmodernism, such as “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. In conjunction, his work on high modernism has often drawn back from the broader claims found in his most famous contributions to the critical landscape. A Singular Modernity, for instance, discusses the difficulty of articulating modernism in any satisfactory sense. In the work, Jameson states he will be “concerned to denounce the sterility of the standard aesthetic move, which consists in isolating ‘modernism’ as a standard by which to compare a whole series of historically and artistically incomparable writers (or painters or musicians)” [5, p. 28]. We could describe these aspects of Jameson’s interaction with modernism as deliberate, echoing his sense of “Habermas’s brilliant formula of an incomplete modernity, of ‘modernity as an unfinished project’” [5, p. 11]. For Jameson, “Habermas’s formula remains usefully ambiguous, and allows one to entertain the possibility that modernity is incomplete because it could never be completed by the middle class and its economic system” [5, p. 11]. This view of an incomplete modernism has become an integral component of Jameson’s work. As Alexander Dunst claims in a review of The Modernist Papers , the “interpretation of the modernist text as a necessary failure—the impossibility of an absolute separation of language and narrative from reference—has been a staple of Jameson’s criticism for decades” [6, p. 120]. Within this context, critics have also painted Jameson himself as a thoroughly modernist figure. Philip E. Wegner, for instance, sees The Political Unconscious as a paradigmatic example of “theoretical modernism” and reads the text in terms of modernist form [see 4, pp. 43–59]. Work

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that comments on Jameson’s supposed nostalgia has also often framed his project as modernist. Haynes Horne, for example, states: “Jameson’s work stands as a fascinating instance of a ‘late’ modernism, for where it is unavoidable … it incorporates poststructuralist elements piecemeal and strategically; but in its cognitive-theoretical underpinnings, Jameson’s work continues to posit, finally, a modernist commitment to totality not unlike other enlightenment projects before it” [7, pp. 268–269]. Jameson himself has claimed, “I’m a person of the 1950s rather than the 1960s” when noting his slight remove from the moment of postmodernism [8, p. 120]. In this regard, we might align his project with his own sense of late modernism, which is derived somewhat from Charles Jencks. In Postmodernism, Jameson claims “Jencks’s late moderns are those who persist into postmodernism, and the idea makes sense architecturally; a literary frame of reference, however, throws up names like Borges and Nabokov, Beckett … who had the misfortune to span two eras and the luck to find a time capsule of isolation or exile in which to spin out unseasonable forms” [2, p. 305]. Within this complex sense of Jameson’s interaction with modernism, literature occupies an equally ambiguous position. He often depicts high-modernist novels as closely linked to the tensions and ideologies of the period, but the mediatory relationships remain unclear. For Jameson, realist literature has a privileged relationship to the world it portrays, and a role to play in the recoding of Western subjective experience. Nevertheless, in texts such as The Antinomies of Realism, he discusses the aesthetics and politics of realist authors with a critical distance. In his work on high modernism, however, Jameson closely connects the artistic goals and ideologies of its literary proponents with contemporary developments in capitalist society. His tendency to partially articulate modernism contributes to the obscurity of these relationships. Across this chapter, it will be necessary to discuss his sense of the period in detail, in order to better locate literature’s position within Jameson’s delineation of broader, often more global changes. Despite the uncertain position the period regularly occupies within his larger project, Jameson sees modernism as an important component of his work, from Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961) onwards. In an afterword written for the 1984 edition, he claims that the text attempts to “replace Sartre in literary history itself … between the modernist tradition and Sartrean narrative or stylistic procedures” [9, p. 205]. The Origins of

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a Style opens with a discussion of modernist style, with Jameson characteristically relating changes in cultural forms to an increasing cultural fragmentation: In our time, when there are no longer any self-justifying forms or any commonly recognized literary language, the very importance of a writer’s work comes to be dependent on what is new in it and on the sudden appearance or absence of a style radically different from anything at that point in existence. This increased significance of style … sets it slowly in contradiction with the older forms, until the new ones are devised to permit us not merely to notice the style but to direct upon it the principle attention of our reading. And at other moments the two, the inherited form and the style that fills it in spite of itself with more modern content, coexist in a work that thus reflects not so much a weakness of the writer’s talent but a new and problematic moment in his situation, a moment of crisis in the history of the development of writing itself. [9, p. vii]

While he rarely discusses Marxist theory at this stage of his career, Jameson connects high-modernist literature with the development of reification in the text: “Sartre’s works face the same … aesthetic problems that the older generation of moderns attempted to solve in a different way: the place of chance and of facticity in the work of art, the collapse of a single literary language, a period style, the expression of a relatively homogeneous class, into a host of private styles and isolated points in a fragmented society” [9, p. 205]. Despite this wide initial focus—and the afterword’s later claims—The Origins of a Style only occasionally sees its subject in relation to other modernist writers. James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and Marcel Proust make their initial appearances in Jameson’s body of work here, but are only briefly engaged with. In the next stage of his career, Jameson would reveal a broader range of textual interests, particularly in terms of modernist literature. He references Joyce, Mann and Proust throughout Marxism and Form, but he also considers Albert Camus, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and F. Scott Fitzgerald, amongst others. The chapter on Adorno also engages with composers Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, with Jameson describing an early twentieth century where “the total organization of the economy ends up alienating the very language and thoughts of its human population, and by dispelling the last remnant of the older autonomous subject or ego: advertising, market research, psychological testing, and a host of other sophisticated techniques of mystification now complete

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a thorough planification of the public” [10, p. 36]. With these statements, Jameson develops his notion of the modernist text as defined by the increasing industrialisation, reification and fragmentation of Western urban experience. At the same time, he reads modernist literature as an often critical or utopian gesture, claiming modernism was “in its essence profoundly antisocial, and reckoned with the instinctive hostility of the middle-class public of which it stood as a negation and a refusal” [10, p. 413]. Throughout the next decade, Jameson would publish several articles engaging with modernism in some capacity. These would include: “Wyndham Lewis as Futurist” (1973), “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism” (1975) and “Towards a Libidinal Economy of Three Modern Painters” (1979). These articles would culminate with the publication of Fables of Aggression, which develops the concepts discussed in Marxism and Form: “The modernist gesture is thus ideological and Utopian all at once: perpetuating the increasing subjectivization of individual experience and the atomization and disintegration of the older social communities … it also embodies a will to overcome the commodification of late nineteenth-century capitalism” [11, p. 39]. Despite often discussing prominent figures of institutional modernism, Fables of Aggression remains one of Jameson’s least conventional texts. The work considers the more subversive or problematic elements of the period’s literature and ideologies. For Jameson, the utopian high-modernist gesture mirrors protofascist tendencies, which “may be characterized as a shifting strategy of class alliances whereby an initially strong populist and anticapitalist impulse is gradually readapted to the ideological habits of a petty bourgeoisie” [11, p. 15]. Along with The Origins of a Style, Fables of Aggression is one of Jameson’s few texts to focus on a single novelist throughout. Perhaps due to the linking of modernist ideology to fascism—or the minor popularity of Wyndham Lewis, the text’s primary focus—the book has remained Jameson’s least discussed work. While the narrow focus might be a contributing factor to the book’s obscurity, we could also blame the text’s internal lack of cohesion, with the work often lacking the narrative unity that Wegner sees in Marxism and Form and The Political Unconscious . Across the text, protofascism, fascism, Nazism, Marxism, socialism, communism, hegemonic liberalism, naturalism, futurism, conservatism and Catholicism all emerge as possible ideological choices for the period. In this manner, the book foregrounds a sense of high modernity as a period of extreme flux. For Jameson, Lewis’

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rapid formal development represents a multitude of responses to a larger problem of fragmentation, and Jameson aligns the author with a particular high modernist cohort, one comprised of “Pound, Eliot, Joyce and Yeats” [11, p. 87]. With the publication of The Political Unconscious two years later, Jameson began to limit his engagement with modernism in certain ways. Within the text, for example, he creates a self-imposed boundary for discussing the modern. He states, “after the peculiar heterogeneity of the moment of Conrad, a high modernism is set in place which it is not the object of this book to consider” [12, p. 280]. In the text, Jameson sees Conrad as a transitional author, a figure who stands between the realism of the nineteenth century and the high modernism of the early twentieth century. As Jameson’s reading develops, Conrad’s position in the development of literary style becomes symptomatic of the movement from market capitalism to monopoly capitalism. Throughout, high modernism remains largely on the periphery and only receives a brief summation. Within this discussion, Jameson again sees high-modernist literature and visual art as ideologically sympathetic to the reification process but also a utopian compensation for this negative development. For Jameson: The increasing abstraction of visual art thus proves not only to express the abstraction of daily life and to presuppose fragmentation and reification; it also constitutes a Utopian compensation for everything lost in … capitalism—the place of quality in an increasingly quantified world, the place of the archaic and of feeling amid the desacralization of the market system, the place of sheer color and intensity within the grayness of measurable extension and geometrical abstraction. [12, pp. 236–237]

While elsewhere suggesting that this kind of cultural practice has political value—offering elements of a cognitive mapping process and subverting dominant ideologies in some manner—Jameson finishes the chapter by claiming: “The perfected poetic apparatus of high modernism represses History just as successfully as the perfected narrative apparatus of high realism did the random heterogeneity of the as yet uncentered subject. At this point, however, the political … has at last become a genuine Unconscious” [12, p. 280]. Here Jameson locates high modernism as the moment where the political becomes wholly repressed in literature, even if elsewhere the utopian qualities of modernist cultural material are reinforced.

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While the passage amounts to a singular moment over a long and highly prolific career, the claim denotes a persistent ambiguity surrounding Jameson’s construction of modernism. Despite the consistent discussion of reification and utopian response, he often allows the period and its literature to shift within these contexts. This is particularly evident in his work that posits modernism in relation to the historical stages of the nineteenth century and postmodernity, both of which Jameson more explicitly defines. In “On Raymond Chandler” (1970), for example, he loosely describes the high modernism of the United States: “The last great period of American literature, which ran more or less from one world war to the other, explored and defined America in geographical mode, as a sum of separate localisms” [13, pp. 68–69]. He contrasts this moment with postmodern literature, which is given much stricter limitations: “since the War, the organic differences from region to region have been increasingly obliterated by standardization…. If there is a crisis in American literature at present, it should be understood against the background of this ungrateful social material, in which only trick shots can produce the illusion of life” [13, p. 69]. This tendency persists and becomes more complex with the publication of Postmodernism. The text’s famous reading of Vincent Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Boots” and Andy Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes” begins by declaring “A Pair of Boots” “one of the canonical works of high modernism in visual art” [2, p. 6]. While Jameson’s sense of semi-autonomous historical development allows for this painting from the 1890s to be seen as high modernism, various issues still complicate the reading. The problem of repressed political content is again insistent, as his reading of “A Pair of Boots” is highly invested in how the work “reworks, transforms and appropriates. In Van Gogh that content, those initial raw materials, are … to be grasped simply as the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state” [2, p. 7]. Jameson explicitly sees Van Gogh’s painting as a “utopian gesture” that “confronts” the political as it responds to the processes of monopoly capitalism. Warhol’s work, in contrast, has less political agency: “the great billboard images of the … Campbell’s soup can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements. If they are not that … one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late

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capital” [2, p. 9]. Once again, while postmodern art is highly limited by Jameson’s narrative of reification, high modernism’s attributes continue to fluctuate. While Jameson’s sense of the modernist period is frequently obscured by his ambiguous engagements with modernism, his version of the modernist canon is more obvious. Throughout his career, he repeatedly returns to a conventional group of high-modernist texts. Short passages, often aiming at a generalised depiction of the period, commonly list T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Marcel Proust, amongst others. Jameson portrays these authors and poets as exemplary literary figures— representative of the age and the high-modernist form—and emphasises a particular notion of the modernist text: difficult, experimental and adverse to the commercial literature that it coexists with. The group also reinforces an almost entirely white, male and Western version of the modernist period, one that makes only minor concessions to the broadened view of the canon recently insisted on by varying scholarly groups. As Alexander Dunst notes of the collected essays in The Modernist Papers: A brief and theoretically dated consideration of the “Libidinal Economy of Three Modern Painters” and an essay on Gertrude Stein form the only exceptions to the masculine literary focus, and even when Jameson writes about Japan, the writers he considers allow for no surprises: Natsume S¯ oseki, often seen as the country’s foremost author of the Meiji era, and Nobel prize winner Kenzaburo Oe…. The almost absolute exclusion of women and non-Western writers would seem to point rather to a complicity with traditional notions of the canon—an ideological formation most contemporary studies of modernism, and equally, most Marxist criticism, would no doubt want to challenge. [6, p. 185]

While criticisms of totalisation or generalisation have persisted throughout his career, this more specific accusation of a cultural imperialism has become important to our current perception of Jameson. His essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986), and Aijaz Ahmad’s famous rebuke “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’” (1987) is likely the most famous controversy of Jameson’s career. The debate has particular relevance to his discussions of modernism, as we will see below. Firstly, however, it will be necessary to summarise this debate and its consequences. Jameson’s essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” is an attempt to see regional literatures in relation to varying

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histories of colonisation, as well as differing positions within contemporary global capitalism. For Jameson, third-world literature is able to perform more varied operations than analogous Western material. He argues that “one of the determinants of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western realist and modernist novel, is a radical split between the private and the public, between … the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud versus Marx” [14, p. 69]. In contrast, Jameson interprets the work of two major figures—Lu Xun from China and Ousmane Sembène from Senegal—in order to demonstrate that “third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic … necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory” [14, p. 69]. The national allegory hypothesis is also tied to Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, whereby “what is here called ‘national allegory’ is clearly a form of … mapping of the totality, so that the present essay … sketches a theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature” [14, p. 88n]. Nevertheless, Jameson reinforces his position as a critic operating firmly within a US context. As Neil Lazarus notes, Jameson originally wrote “Third-World Literature” as a “memorial lecture at the University of California, San Diego honouring Jameson’s academic colleague and friend, Robert C. Elliot” [15, p. 55]. In the essay’s lengthy preamble—which foregrounds the difficulty for Western readers to engage with noncanonical texts—Jameson seems to assume that his audience is entirely comprised of Western academics. He returns to this notion later in the piece, where he claims: Any articulation of radical difference … is susceptible to appropriation by that strategy of otherness which Edward Said, in the context of the Middle East, called “orientalism.” It does not matter much that the radical otherness of the culture in question is praised or valorized positively, as in the preceding pages: the essential operation is that of differentiation, and once that has been accomplished, the mechanism Said denounces has been set in place. On the other hand, I don’t see how a first-world intellectual can avoid this operation without falling back into some general liberal and humanistic universalism: it seems to me that one of our basic political tasks lies precisely in the ceaseless effort to remind the American public of the radical difference of other national situations. [14, p. 77]

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Despite the provisional claims inserted into the essay, a tension remains between Jameson’s gestures towards peripheral cultural material, and his position as a critic operating firmly within a neo-imperialist state. This sense of conflict is highly visible in surveying the response of postcolonial scholars to “Third-World Literature”. The most remarked upon aspect of the article is directly related to one of Jameson’s more didactic statements: “All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories ” [14, p. 69]. Along with the opening section discussing the difficulty of Western readers to properly receive a non-canonical text (often seen as diminishing or othering postcolonial literatures), critics have often viewed this sentence as going beyond Jameson’s tendency to generalise and becoming evidence of a parochial empiricism. Ahmad’s “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness”, published a year later, was the first of several claims in this fashion, and the essay has come to represent a larger push away from Jameson by postcolonial critics. The essay concedes sympathy with a number of Jameson’s points, particularly that “the teaching of literature in the US academy be informed by a sense not only of ‘western’ literature but of ‘world literature’ [and] that the so-called literary canon be based not upon the exclusionary pleasures of dominant taste but upon an inclusive … sense of heterogeneity” [16, p. 3]. Despite these assertions, Ahmad takes specific exception to Jameson’s use of the term third world: “there are fundamental issues— of periodization, social and linguistic formations, political and ideological struggles within the field of literary production, and so on—which simply cannot be resolved at this level of generality without an altogether positivist reductionism” [16, p. 4]. Ahmad sees the third world as a useful term in “loose polemic contexts” but resists its deployment “as a basis for producing theoretical knowledge, which presumes a certain rigor in constructing the object of one’s knowledge” [16, p. 4]. Furthermore, for Ahmad, the three-world system that Jameson denotes in his essay erases the heterogeneity in a variety of developing countries, whereby “various countries … have been assimilated into the global structure of capitalism not as a single cultural ensemble but highly differentially, each establishing its own circuits of (unequal) exchange with the metropolis, each acquiring its own very distinct class formations” [16, p. 10]. Crucial to Ahmad’s critique is a denunciation of Jameson’s notion of “cognitive aesthetics”. Ahmad sees this desire for cognitive aesthetics as resting “upon a suppression of the multiplicity of significant difference among

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and within both the advanced capitalist countries and the imperialised formations” [16, p. 3]. Throughout this critique, Ahmad displays the multitude of political, economic and cultural realities in postcolonial nations that Jameson supposedly elides when describing the Third World as “a range of … countries which have suffered the experience of colonialism and imperialism” [14, p. 67]. Ahmad’s essay was highly influential and sparked a broader shift away from Jameson’s work in postcolonial studies. Writing in 2006, Ian Buchanan claimed, Ahmad’s “critique of Jameson is generally claimed as definitive; in fact I have not been able to find one single rejoinder that is sustained enough to warrant the name” [17, p. 174]. For Buchanan, the problems with critiques of Jameson’s essay are ones of misinterpretation, claiming they “blindly misread ‘national allegory’ as ‘nationalist ideology’” [17, p. 174]. Across his essay, Buchanan seeks to contextualise “Third-World Literature” and reinforces a particular aspect of Jameson’s writing: his discussions are committed to dialectical thought and, therefore, the problems he works through remain in tension throughout. In this particular example, the problem of how to theorise the nation unsurprisingly revolves around problematic prior concepts of nationhood. Jameson acknowledges these longstanding cultural associations, but allows them to circulate in an ambiguous manner. While Jameson has predominantly avoided commenting on this controversy, one of his major considerations of modernism again moves into a similar area of debate. Published early in the twenty-first century, A Singular Modernity considers the modernisation process in a broad sense, but also concentrates on the more specific periods of high modernism and late modernism. The work opens with a wide-ranging survey of opposing notions of modernity, the term’s etymology, early critical debates and contemporary considerations. The text delineates a heterogeneous sense of the period; however, Jameson also argues against a turn towards theories of alternative modernities: Everyone knows the formula by now: this means that there can be a modernity for everybody which is different from the standard or hegemonic Anglo-Saxon model. Whatever you dislike about the latter … can be effaced by the reassuring … notion that you can fashion your own modernity differently, so that there can be a Latin-American kind, or an Indian kind … and so forth…. But this is to overlook the other fundamental meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself.

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The standardization projected by capitalist globalization … casts considerable doubt on all these pious hopes for cultural variety in a future world colonized by a universal market order. [5, pp. 12–13]1

Critics discussing alternate modernities or “geomodernisms” have argued for a less restricted notion of the modernist period and its canon. In these areas of study, scholars have considered the global aspects of modernism. For example, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel claim that connecting disparate modernisms “requires a rethinking of periodization, genealogies, affiliations, and forms. To some degree, this rethinking estranges the category of modernism itself. The term modernism breaks open, into something we call geomodernisms, which signals a locational approach to modernisms’ engagement with cultural and political discourses of global modernity” [18, p. 3]. In Jameson’s rebuke of some of this work above, we might argue that Jameson’s work on high modernism again becomes susceptible to accusations of cultural imperialism. His insistence on the priority of Western capitalist systems in postcolonial contexts has the potential to erase difference and the agency of the subaltern. This view of Jameson should be tempered, however, by work throughout his career that argue for a more complex and global sense of modernism. In Postmodernism, Jameson describes modernism as “uniquely corresponding to an uneven moment of social development, or to what Ernst Bloch called the ‘simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’” [2, p. 307]. Jameson’s imperative is to reinforce what he sees as missing from theories of alternative modernities, which is the underlying development of global capitalism— even as it plays out in an uneven fashion across the globe. This chapter will argue that Jameson’s engagement with canonical modernist literature acknowledges a multitude of modernist practices and processes of uneven development, while maintaining this underlying economic narrative. We may be unable to reconcile scholarship that insists on the radical plurality of the modernisation process with Jameson’s apparent “reductionist economism” [19, p. 148]. Nevertheless, through his notion of cognitive mapping, we might still align Jameson’s work with a variety of ongoing discussions pertaining to modernism in postcolonial literary studies.

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The Centre and the Periphery in Jameson’s High-Modernist Canon The modernist canon Jameson describes in his published work remains in some form of flux up until the late 1970s. The modernists he sees as paradigmatic across his career appear from The Origins of a Style onwards, but his early material is more likely to include authors who fall outside of the high-modernist canon. Marxism and Form contains a reading of Ernest Hemingway, for example, where Hemingway’s concentration on writing as “labour” produces a specific modernist style: “The art-sentence itself, as it has been so variously cultivated and practiced in modern times from Flaubert to Hemingway, may be seen alternatively as a type of work or mode of production…. In modern literature, indeed, the production of the sentence becomes itself a new kind of event within the work, and generates a whole new kind of form” [10, p. 397]. Jameson sees this personal style as a particular response to cultural fragmentation, in a manner typically reserved for figures such as Joyce: “As for the human environment of Hemingway’s books, expatriation is itself a kind of device or pretext for them. For the immense … fabric of American social reality itself is clearly inaccessible to the careful and selective type of sentence which he practices: so it is useful to do with a reality thinned out, the reality of foreign cultures and of foreign languages” [10, p. 412]. Here, Hemingway’s novels manage to avoid the formal problems that Jameson associates with any realist attempt to map and depict modernism as a period. Hemingway’s style is seen as a distinctively modernist solution to this formal dilemma. At this stage of his career, Jameson’s sense of the modernist canon is also less restricted because the period and its terminology are more loosely defined. For example, “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism” uses the term quite broadly, including within its remit Picasso’s early “African” period (1906–1909) and Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn (1963). Meanwhile, in “Three Modern Painters”, Jameson sees Cézanne and Flaubert as “the moment of the twin birth of modernism and mass culture, when as in some historically new ‘division of labor,’ the older molar storytelling or representational unities are now assigned to the ‘degraded’ status of the best-seller or the film, while the molecular experience of language or sheer paint becomes the perceptual center of the new ‘high art’” [20, p. 260]. Marxism and Form, on the other hand, discusses a “new modernism [that] differs from the older classical one of the turn

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of the century…. What characterizes the new modernism is however precisely that it is popular, maybe not in small mid-Western towns, but in the dominant world of fashion and the mass media” [10, pp. 413–414]. Jameson’s examples of this new modernism—“John Cage’s music, Andy Warhol’s movies, novels by Burroughs, plays by Beckett, Godard, camp, Norman O. Brown, psychedelic experiences”—would remain largely unchanged in his later essays that theorise postmodernism as a more definitive break from modernism, published over a decade later [10, p. 413]. In these moments, the reader can glimpse how Jameson demarcations of these periods and their canons are less restricted at this stage of his career. By the time of Fables of Aggression, however, Jameson’s sense of the modernism’s literature would be noticeably more limited. T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Marcel Proust would continue to make regular appearances, but middlebrow authors such as Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald would no longer figure in this material. Two years later, Jameson would claim modernism had “now become a literary institution”, with certain authors of the period categorised and reified in an academic context [12, p. 206]. Even as he appears to criticise this development, it remains that his own groupings of modernist figures become somewhat conservative after this period, and his parameters for discussing modernism become more established. Particularly in more glancing interactions with the early twentieth century, he allows high modernism to take an expected position within his larger narrative of capitalist development and the increasing reification of the Western world. In Postmodernism, for example, Jameson depicts the period within these parameters—and reinforces the importance of high modernism to its depiction—when claiming “the various modernisms have … often constituted violent reactions against modernization as they have replicated its values and tendencies by their own formal insistence on novelty, innovation, the transformation of older forms, therapeutic iconoclasm and the processing of new (aesthetic) wonder-working technologies” [2, p. 304]. He also emphasises this high-modernist preference in his discussion of late modernism, which he will more strictly separate from the high or classical modernists later in his career. For example, Jameson claims: “The first modernists had to operate in a world in which no acknowledged … role existed for them and in which the very form and concept of their own specific ‘works of art’ were lacking. But for [the] late modernists this is no longer the case … Nabokov is unlike Joyce … by virtue of

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the fact that Joyce already existed and that he can serve as a model” [5, pp. 199–200]. Here, the late modernists transform the heterogeneity of the classical modernist moment into a more limited series of conventional forms. Jameson no longer attributes a utopian impulse to the literature of the latter period, which we can link to the diminished cultural importance he attributes to late modernism. He reinforces this notion when he describes Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) as “one of the rare … masterpieces of the late modern” [5, p. 201]. Furthermore, as his sense of the modernist canon begins to concentrate more explicitly on the high modern examples, the figures within this group remain largely unchanged. Jameson’s limited discussion of Virginia Woolf becomes a revealing example of this tendency. As John Mepham notes, “between Virginia Woolf’s death in 1941 and the mid1970s the number of books published about her work was quite small. Since that time, however, there has been an enormous flood of publications” [21, p. 1]. The importance of Woolf to an established canon of Western modernist novels has increased considerably since Jameson’s early training, yet his engagement with her remains curiously indirect. For example, his essay “Modernism and Imperialism” (1988) was originally published as part of a series of Field Day pamphlets entitled “Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature”. Terry Eagleton and Edward Said also provided essays for the series. The three pamphlets would later be reprinted together as a short volume. Jameson looks at E. M. Forster’s Howards End and Joyce’s Ulysses in his contribution, as well as briefly mentioning Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). In both of these early publications of “Modernism and Imperialism”, Jameson includes a note that states, “formally, the position of Mrs. Wilcox … demands comparison with that of Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, an analysis of which forms a part of the larger version of this present essay” [see 22, p. 16n; 23, p 56n]. This larger version would never eventuate: in The Modernist Papers this article is once again reprinted, but the footnote— and any extended discussion of To the Lighthouse—is omitted [See 20, p. 161]. More recently, in the first chapter of The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson cites a brief passage from Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), which describes a meal. He does not reveal the origin of the citation—neither stating the author’s name nor providing a bibliographical footnote—and only refers to the passage as “the anonymous lunch” [24, p. 25]. Well into the next chapter, Jameson alludes to the citation again, mentioning “the

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lunch-flower of Virginia Woolf that has been quoted above” [24, p. 37]. This time Jameson provides a footnote that reveals the specific novel he is discussing. At this stage of his text, however, the reader may certainly be confused as to when exactly Woolf was mentioned “above”. Furthermore, in his first opaque reference to Woolf here, he claims that the lunch she describes “is a rather different lunch from many we can remember reading about: the one which makes Mr. Bloom belch with satisfaction in Ulysses ; the immense two-hundred-page lunches in Proust…. All of those … are inserted into one or another kind of narrative time; the anonymous lunch in which one course is peeled off after another is not” [24, p. 25]. The inference that we might not remember Woolf’s literature, or that it operates on a differing level to two other paradigmatic modernists is not further discussed. Once again, Woolf remains a marginal figure in Jameson’s work, one whose status has not risen to a level similar to that of Joyce, and her treatment becomes symptomatic of Jameson’s restricted engagement with modernist literature. Jameson’s common reliance on Joyce’s Ulysses to represent the modernist period is also indicative of a tendency to contain modernist literature’s qualities. Marxism and Form’s chapter on Adorno, for instance, mentions Henry James, Thomas Mann, Proust and Schoenberg to demonstrate variations in modernist cultural material, but it is Joyce who “embodies an exemplary [modernist] progress from a derivative personal style … through the multiple pastiches of Ulysses , toward something which transcends both style and pastiche altogether, and which … may stand as a distant representation of some future linguistic organization of a postindividualistic character” [10, p. 34]. Elsewhere, the novel’s use of semi-autonomous chapters and the framing device of a single day are seen as modernist responses to both the problem of narrative form and the increasing fragmentation of subjectivity. In A Singular Modernity, Ulysses is described as a reaction to the modernisation process, tied to an impossible imperative to contain the changing, expanding world: “And does not every line of Ulysses bear witness to an ever-changing empirical reality which Joyce’s multiple forms (from the Odyssey parallel on down to the chapter form and sentence structure themselves) are unable to master?” [5, pp. 207–208]. In “Ulysses in History”, Jameson describes this operation as a utopian gesture, claiming the novel goes through a process of de-reification, “whereby the text itself is unsettled and undermined, a process whereby the universal tendency of its terms, narrative tokens, representations, to solidify into an achieved and codified symbolic

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order as well as a massive narrative surface, is perpetually suspended” [20, p. 143]. Despite his insistence on the individuality and specificity of the various major modernists, in this one locus Jameson is able to interconnect many of his recurring themes of modernism. In Ulysses , he finds narratives of perpetual reinvention, industrialisation, imperialism, colonialism and fragmentation, with the novel becoming an all-purpose response to many of the historical factors of the period. Intriguingly, Jameson has made a number of recent comments discussing his textual choices, particularly in relation to modernist literature. In The Modernist Papers , he claims: The literary texts might also be taken to form some personal canon, if not indeed a constellation of more universal validity. But that is to reckon without absences or omissions which are themselves accidental, however much I regret them. Only Japan seemed called upon to stand for the nonWestern … world; which scarcely documents my own personal debts to Latin America, to North Africa, or to China. As far as my private formation is concerned, indeed I would have to be puzzled by the absence of Pound of Faulkner…. To be sure, there are sometimes professional explanations for such gaps: some of the texts discussed in this collection are here because I taught them in classes and seminars; but just as often works and writers equally important to me are missing precisely because I taught them so often. [20, pp. ix–x]

Similarly, in a roundtable article focusing on The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson responds to discussions concerning his exclusion of American authors, touching on modernism briefly: “This collection of Americanist responses to my book on realism demands … some explanation about the exclusion of American novels, something I’m always reluctant to give. But for literary critics, the basic autobiographical questions turn on opinions, judgment and taste…. I could answer some of those quickly—I grew up on Faulkner, Pound and James” [25, p. 1086]. In this fashion, Jameson commonly writes against a sense of his career as rigidly systemic and ordered. The passage reminds readers of the contingencies and compromises that influence his published body of work—despite the curatorial operation he continues to perform as he collects multitudes of previously available articles in newer texts. As his comments on alternate modernities in A Singular Modernity suggest, Jameson is conscious of several developments in literary theory that argue for the widening of canonical focuses, or for more complex considerations of texts that exists on the periphery

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of the established canon. The caginess of the above quotations indicates Jameson is aware of the conventional choices found across his body of work, and the Eurocentric, patriarchal biases they might imply. As mentioned above, this focus on Western modernists is closely connected to an insistence on a narrative of capitalist development. Here, Henry Ford occasionally stands as an example of the age, one we can compare with Jameson’s oft-used authors. Ford’s assembly line becomes shorthand for capitalism’s progress, and the worker’s alienation from their own production. Jameson expands on this by discussing Max Weber’s notion of rationalization in A Singular Modernity: “‘rationalization’ is a process whose … precondition lies in the dismantling of traditional activities, not least traditional forms of craft skills, as those survive on into the factory process…. Ford’s assembly line comes into view, along with … the loss of control over the process of the worker himself, who no longer sees and grasps it as a meaningful whole” [5, p. 83]. Across Jameson’s career, Ford makes several appearances, in this instance becoming simply an industrial process, at other times ironically elevated to a philosopher of the age. Jameson discusses modernist history in this context as “that endless series of sheer facts and unrelated events proposed, in their very different ways, by Nietzsche as well as by Henry Ford (‘one goddamned thing after another’)” [5, p. 29]. There are also several recurring instances where Ford appears tangentially in relation to discussions of nostalgia, and these intersections demonstrate how Ford becomes a floating signifier in Jameson’s work. As a major figure in Doctorow’s Ragtime, Jameson often mentions Ford when discussing the novel. For Jameson, Doctorow’s use of real historical figures in a self-consciously artificial fashion is indicative of the difficulty in postmodernism to represent the past. Jameson also mentions Ford in “On Raymond Chandler”, this time in relation to corporate branding: “the Cold War also marked the beginning of the great post-war boom, and with it, the prodigious expansion in advertising…. The older products had … a permanence of identity that can still be captured … in farm country…. Here, the brand-name is still synonymous with the object itself: a car is a ‘Ford,’ a lighter is a ‘Ronson,’ a hat is a ‘Stetson’” [13, p. 77]. In these examples, Ford becomes a thoroughly postmodern and intertextual concept. He circulates freely as a historical figure, an emblematic brand and an industrial mode. The version of modernity that Jameson describes when using Ford as a particular representation of the era takes on another facet, however, in the work that comes after Postmodernism.

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Here Jameson begins to use the term “post-Fordism” in relation to the development of capitalism and its dominant mode of production, particularly in The Seeds of Time (1994). David Gartman discusses how Jameson uses post-Fordism as a concept in order demarcate the beginning of the postmodern: Jameson [seeks] to explain the recent emergence of a postmodern culture as a consequence of a new stage of the capitalist economy called postFordism. In his earlier work on postmodernism, Jameson relied largely on Ernest Mandel’s theory of late capitalism to provide an economic grounding for cultural changes. But as Mike Davis points out, Jameson’s cultural stage of postmodernism, which begins in full force in 1973, is incongruent with Mandel’s economic stage of late capitalism, which commences in 1945. Perhaps for this reason Jameson’s more recent statement on these issues employs the language of post-Fordism to characterize the economic stage corresponding with postmodernism. This not only makes his chronology more synchronous, since the beginning of the postFordist economy is generally dated from the early 1970s, but it also makes Jameson’s work compatible with the growing body of work, including that of David Harvey, Edward Soja, Lawrence Grossberg, and Stuart Hall, that links postmodernism and post-Fordism. [26, pp. 120–121]

Gartman’s article is an extensive discussion of the terms Fordism and postFordism, as well as the boundaries created by Jameson and other critics in their usage of such terms, calling into question the rigour of their usage. Gartman claims that theories of Fordism require further development: First, the theory must loosen its synchronous and uniform conception of social change to recognize the possibility—even the likelihood—of diverse and uneven developments. Culture should be seen as a response or reaction to economic changes by producers within a particular social structure…. Second, this theory must also be altered to recognize that these cultural responses may exert a dialectical influence on economic developments, facilitating and contradicting them. Such dialectical influence further accounts for the disjointed, uneven movement of history. [25, p. 135]

While Gartman is focused on Jameson’s notion of postmodernity, the passage is especially relevant to Jameson’s ambiguous sense of modernist

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development. Through his persistent reframing of modernism’s boundaries, Jameson’s engagements with the period are marked by an even more pronounced blurring of categories. Within the essays and texts that concentrate on Western modernists, however, Jameson’s discussions of nation reveal a more complex sense of the literary moment, one more interested in peripheries and uneven development than Gartman claims above. And despite the controversy surrounding “Third-World Literature” and Jameson’s comments in A Singular Modernity, his work on modernism addresses notions of alternate modernities that reflect this notion of uneven development. For example, in “Modernism and Imperialism”, he comments on how England, though being “the very heartland of imperialism, is also that national terrain which seems to have been the least propitious for the development of any indigenous modernism” [20, p. 159]. In a note, he adds, “it is, I take it, the position of Terry Eagleton’s stimulating Exiles and Emigres … that all the most important modern writers of what we think of as the English canon are in fact social marginals of various kinds, when not outright foreigners” [20, p. 168n9]. This is particularly true of Jameson’s most frequently used examples of modernism: the Irish Joyce, T. S. Eliot, who took British citizenship, and Pound, whose career began in earnest in London, all fit this description in some capacity.2 With parallels to the sense that Conrad exists between two literary positions in The Political Unconscious , Jameson is often interested in authors who cross boundaries in terms of nation. For instance, when discussing T. S. Eliot, Jameson states: “the Europeanism of the American poet … could function as a kind of aesthetic NATO ideology and prepare the British integration into the postwar continent” [5, p. 168]. This sense of modernism as particularly transnational also appears in his work on E. M. Forster, Wyndham Lewis and, unsurprisingly, Joyce. The material on these three modernists often concentrates on notions of nation, empire and occupation, ultimately pointing to the larger conceptual threads that run through Jameson’s often fragmentary material on modernism. Here, his attempts to impose a linear narrative related primarily to Western capitalist development contrast with his textual readings, which reinforce the diverse, transnational and alternate nature of global modernisms. This work also offers an opposing view of his sense of modernism: Jameson often adheres to somewhat conventional senses of the modernist canon, but also allows contradictory impulses to appear within this framework.

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Fables of Aggression follows this pattern, with its early attempt to consider the modernist text in terms of the global—even as Wyndham Lewis, “in Britain today … retains a kind of national celebrity and is read as a more scandalous and explosive Waugh; while internationally his name remains a dead letter” [11, p. 2]. Lewis is another of Jameson’s transitional figures: “an internationalist, the most European and least insular of all the great contemporary British writers” [11, p. 88]. In this regard, Jameson claims, “in Lewis’ imagination … the German nation, as the pariah of European politics and the victim of Versailles, tends to figure the id rather than that repressive superego which the Prussian manner has generally connoted for foreigners” [11, p. 89]. Within this context, Jameson introduces his notion of national allegory, whereby “the use of national types projects an essentially allegorical mode of representation, in which the individual characters figure those more abstract national characteristics which are read as their inner essence” [11, p. 90]. Jameson will complicate this notion of national allegory in his reading of Tarr, where “the various national types find themselves grouped within a common ballroom or Grand Hotel, [and] a more complex network of interrelations and collisions emerges…. Under these circumstances, allegory ceases to be [a] static decipherment of one-one one correspondences” [11, p. 90]. The national types represented in Tarr become reflective of a larger political context, which sees “not merely the nation-state itself as the basic functional unit of world politics, but also the objective existence of a system of nation-states, the international diplomatic machinery of pre-World-War-I Europe which originating in the sixteenth century, was dislocated in significant ways by the War and the Soviet Revolution” [11, p. 94]. From here, Jameson will argue that “national allegory should be understood as a formal attempt to bridge the increasing gap between the existential data of everyday life within a given nation-state and the structural tendency of monopoly capital to develop on a worldwide, essentially transnational scale” [11, p. 94]. While Fables of Aggression remains predominantly focused on Europe, Jameson will expand on these notions of global monopoly capitalism with work on modernism elsewhere. “Modernism and Imperialism”, for example, looks at the development of modernism in relation to the emergence of the colonial system. The essay predominantly discusses E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), with Jameson seeing the figure of Mr. Wilcox as representative of a series of cognitive gaps between the coloniser, colonised nations and the metropolitan cities at the heart of

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empires: “We are only able to see that face the ‘Imperial type’ turns inward, towards the internal metropolitan reality. The other pole of the relationship, what defines him fundamentally and essentially in his ‘imperial’ function—the persons of the colonized—remains structurally occluded, and cannot but so remain … as a result of the limits of the system” [20, p. 163]. In the same essay, Jameson will see Joyce in this same context of colonialism and imperialism: The hypothesis suggested here—between the emergence of a properly modernist “style” and the representational dilemmas of the new imperial world system—will be validated only by the kind of new work it enables…. [This is] not, in this period, to be found in … the Third World, or in the colonies: there the face of imperialism is brute force … open exploitation; but there also the mapping of the imperialist world system remains structurally incomplete, for the colonial subject will be unable to register the peculiar transformations of … metropolitan life which accompany the imperial relationship…. What we seek, therefore, is a kind of exceptional situation, one of the overlap and coexistence between two incommensurable realities which are … those of the metropolis and of the colony simultaneously…. At least one such peculiar space exists, in the historical contingency of our global system: it is Ireland…. [Here] we may expect to find, in some abstractly possible Irish modernism, a form which on the one hand unites Forster’s sense of the providential yet seemingly accidental encounters of the characters with Woolf’s aesthetic closure, but which on the other hand projects those onto a radically different kind of space, a space no longer central, as in English life, but marked as marginal and ec-centric after the fashion of the colonized areas of the imperial system…. But this “deduction” finds immediate historical confirmation, for I have in fact been describing Ulysses . [20, pp. 164–165]

In his essay on Jameson and Fordism, Gartman denies the presence of “responses that vary from country to country” [26, p. 135]. Across Jameson’s career, however, we can find examples of him discussing high modernism in terms of national and geographic permutations—he often compares different instances of modernism with various narratives of industrialisation and imperialism. These moments serve to reinforce his narrative of high modernism’s sheer heterogeneity, as well as his underlying principle that high-modernist works ultimately reflect the capitalist industrialisation process. In a non-Western context, for example, Jameson’s reading of S¯ oseki, which outlines a combination of Proust’s

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“idea of a routine and a daily life” and a “modernist distension of temporality” within the novel Meian, does so under the pretext that Japan’s modernisation process was much more rapid than Europe’s [20, p. 300]. In doing so, Jameson asks if in modernist Japan “there existed the same … bourgeois stereotypes about everyday life that were constructed in the West during the realist period and which had in the modern already entered into a crisis…. One could imagine a situation, in the … East, in which the construction of bourgeois everyday life … took place simultaneously with its modern moment” [20, p. 300]. Here, we can closely align Jameson’s work on the modern with his sense of cognitive mapping. Critics have predominantly associated the notion of cognitive mapping with Jameson’s discussions of postmodernity, where it makes its most notable appearances. In Postmodernism, he considers an aesthetics of cognitive mapping, which he sees as a notyet-existing cultural practice, but a crucial process in the demystification of a larger postmodern capitalist system. When discussing this concept, Jameson draws on Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960), as well as Georg Lukács’ conflation of realism with the representation of totalities. In Postmodernism, Jameson claims a “political culture appropriate to our own situation will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental organizing concern. I will therefore provisionally define the aesthetic of this new (and hypothetical) cultural form as an aesthetic of cognitive mapping ” [2, p. 51]. He sees the cognitive map as providing “a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” [2, p. 51]. In his early work on cognitive mapping, Jameson occasionally reinforces the notion that “the social totality can be sensed, as it were, from the outside, like a skin at which the Other somehow looks, but which we ourselves will never see” [27, p. 114]. In “Third-World Literature”, he aligns himself with Lukács’ “epistemology in History and Class Consciousness according to which ‘mapping’ or the grasping of the social totality is structurally available to the dominated rather than the dominating classes” [14, pp. 87–88n26]. The essay attempts to see regional literatures in relation to varying histories of colonisation, as well as differing situations within contemporary global capitalism. Within this context, Jameson ties his national allegory hypothesis to the notion of cognitive mapping, whereby “what is here called ‘national allegory’ is clearly a form of mapping, so … the present essay … sketches a theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature” [14,

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p. 87n26]. The work on Forster, Joyce and Lewis discussed throughout this chapter may not mention cognitive mapping, but the imperative to map an empirical capitalist system in these essays has obvious affinities with the concept. Despite the ambiguities that surround Jameson’s sense of modernism and its political potential, the modernist text remains a mapping operation within his work. The primacy that he attributes to Joyce and Ulysses in particular may reflect an often-conservative version of the modernist canon, but the text is read as providing an immense cognitive map of wider global contexts. In this light, the relationship between cognitive mapping and allegory becomes important: Jameson’s reading of Ulysses does not claim that the text maps an all-encompassing set of colonial relationships, but sees the novel as able to discuss a broader colonial situation through its specific national position. More recently, work within postcolonial studies has begun to read modernist novels in terms of cultural geographies. Within this area of study, however, critics have not often referenced Jameson. For example, in her discussion of the geopolitical in Virginia Woolf’s fiction, Susan Stanford Friedman claims “Fredric Jameson has famously commanded in the opening pages of The Political Unconscious ‘Always historicize!’ … To this imperative, we need to add ‘Always spatialize!’—that is, always ask how locational and geographical specifics particularize any given phenomenon or interpretation of it” [28, p. 130]. Friedman’s engagement with Jameson remains brief, however, and she does not mention his work on modernism or his notion of cognitive mapping. Similarly, Jessica Berman’s reading of Ulysses is interested in related questions of geopolitical mapping, in conjunction with ideas of empire and colonial histories. She claims, “when Stephen walks over Sandymount Strand, pondering the significance of the beach and the history of invasion it has witnessed, we may see very clearly the geopolitical implications of the terrain as inseparable from its relationship with human society over time” [29, p. 288]. Her work does not reference Jameson, although a mutual engagement here would offer the opportunity for more complex understandings of modernist texts. We might attribute this lack of engagement with Jameson to both the relative obscurity of his modernist work and the ongoing distance practised by postcolonial scholars in the years after his “Third-World Literature” essay. Furthermore, his dismissal of alternate modernities insists on the primacy of the narrative of capital, at the same time as he concentrates on a limited number of modernist novels. Yet his work on these novels reinforces a similar sense of heterogeneity to

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the modernist moment as argued for by critics such as Berman, Friedman and others. An interpretive practice that sees the modernist text in terms of the geopolitical, while remaining aware of Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, would offer additional nuances to both of these ongoing discussions. In this manner, we might consider ways in which Western modernisms and peripheral or alternate modernisms might further relate or speak to each other, even if fundamental differences remain regarding the underlying causes of the modernisation process.

Metacommentary, Western Marxism and the Canonisation of High Modernism Jameson’s writings on modernist texts also have a more insular—but no less complex—focus, one that relates to the Western theoretical landscape as it has developed across his career. His discussions of the global and empirical in modernism relate to a Marxist model of broader capitalist change. Another historical perspective is apparent, however, in his engagement with a variety of scholarly interpretations of modernist texts. In this manner, Jameson’s notion of “metacommentary” often becomes a guiding parameter for his engagement with modernist literature. The essay “Metacommentary” helped to establish Jameson’s reputation and earned him the William Riley Parker Prize in 1971. Even so, critics more commonly discuss the essay in terms of Jameson’s larger project of dialectical criticism [see 30; 4, p. 44]. David S. Gross sees the essay as an example of subterfuge, claiming “the dialectic … is the component in Marxism which links it to the self-critical, self-scrutinizing thought about thought in modern theory, as Jameson pointed out (without mentioning Marxism by the way) in his famous PLMA essay ‘Metacommentary’ [31, p. 102]. The essay’s prominent venue of publication and fluency with poststructuralist theory suggests Jameson was deliberately fashioning his work in order to reach a wider academic audience. As Robert T. Tally Jr.. suggests, “any commentary upon a given literary text must involve metacommentary, which for Jameson stands as another code word for the project of dialectical criticism itself” [32, p. 58]. Despite its relationship to Jameson’s wider notion of dialectical thought, however, it should be observed that the “Metacommentary” essay is more specifically concerned with the notion of the literary critic as a figure operating within particular historical contexts. Jameson claims metacommentary is “a reflexive operation proposed for staging

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the struggle within an individual literary and cultural text of various interpretations that are themselves so many ‘methods’ or philosophies or ideological worldviews” [33, p. ix].3 While, as Caren Irr and Ian Buchanan note, “in more recent years this term seems to have fallen into disuse”, it remains clear that Jameson’s later material on high modernism often works through this particular kind of operation [34, p. 6]. Perhaps it is because his early years in the academy witnessed the canonisation of modernism—within both university courses and scholarly work—that he so often returns to considering the scholarly reception of certain novels. Jameson’s work on Ulysses , Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann reinforces this notion. In the chapter on Conrad in The Political Unconscious , Jameson briefly alludes to this aspect of his project, claiming that the coexistence of “differentiated cultural ‘spaces’ in Conrad marks his work as a unique occasion for the historical analysis of … literary forms. It also offers a no less unique occasion for the type of investigation around which this book has been organized, namely the ‘metacommentary,’ or the historical and dialectical reevaluation of conflicting interpretive methods” [12, p. 208]. In “Ulysses in History” Jameson seeks to place Joyce’s novel in new contexts, arguing “it would be surprising indeed if we were unable to invent newer and fresher ways of reading Joyce; on the other hand, the traditional interpretations … have become so sedimented into our text … that it is hard see it afresh” [20, p. 137]. Jameson goes on to claim that the traditional readings “are, I would say, threefold, and I will call them the mythical, the psychoanalytical and the ethical readings” [20, p. 137]. The chapter works to place psychoanalytic readings of the novel in broader, more political frameworks, discussing the inadequacy of that third conventional interpretation of Ulysses … namely the fetishization of the text in terms of “archetypal” patterns of father-son relationships…. Surely today, after so much prolonged scrutiny of the nuclear family, it has become apparent that the obsession with these relationships and the privileging of such impoverished interpersonal schemas drawn from the nuclear family itself are to be read as … defense mechanisms against the loss of the knowable community. [20, pp. 141–142]

This material emphasises the historical possibility of interpretive methods, in a similar manner to Jameson’s historicising of narrative form. Another

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scholarly context underlies much of this work, that of Western Marxists and their discussions of modernism. In the first half of the twentieth century, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, amongst others, engaged in debates over modernism in print. In Jameson’s negotiation of these debates, along with his reframing of other critical engagements with modernism, we can glimpse another reason that the period occupies such an ambiguous position within his work. Here, his alignment remains fluid, while allowing for larger historical narratives surrounding notions of monopoly capitalism, empire and reification to retain their priority. In many instances, when Jameson engages with modernist authors and texts in detail, he returns to surveying the critical reception that has developed in relation to them. Discussing Kafka, Jameson reads common critical practice as such: “You do not have to posit some heavyhanded message (Angst or the ‘human condition’) provided you have nailed down the deeper subject matter, which seems … to fall into … three options: the Oedipus complex or at least the guilt of subalternity; bureaucratic dictatorship or the dystopia of modernity; or … God and our relationship to him or to his absence” [20, p. 96]. In relation to Thomas Mann, he similarly asks: “Is Thomas Mann outmoded? … To be sure Buddenbrooks is a classic (but that is just another way of becoming outmoded); while the great debates of The Magic Mountain between liberalism and communism (or fascism) are now, for many, equally dated…. As for Doktor Faustus … is its equation of Nazism with diabolism really relevant any longer?” [20, p. 11]. Here Jameson writes in a general sense, although his concerns about the thematic interpretation of modernist literature are explicated in more detail elsewhere. As mentioned above, he sees the critical interpretations of Ulysses as working in three separate ways: “the mythical, the psychoanalytical and the ethical”. In terms of the mythical, Jameson asks: In this day and age, in which the whole thrust of a militant feminism has been against the nuclear and the patriarchal family, is it really appropriate to recast Ulysses along the lines of marriage counseling and anxiously to interrogate its characters … with a view towards … restoring this family? Has our whole experience of Mr Bloom’s Dublin reduced itself to this the quest for a “happy ending” in which the hapless protagonist is to virilize himself and become a more successful realization of the dominant patriarchal, authoritarian male? [20, p. 138]

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For Jameson, this “particular reading is part of the more general attempt to fit Ulysses back into the Odyssey parallel” [20, p. 138]. Jameson works to diminish the importance of this kind of interpretive practice, claiming: “This parallelism, and the kind of matching it encourages between the two levels of written and over-text, functions as … an empty form. Like the classical unities, it offers a useful but wholly extrinsic set of limits against which the writer works, and which serve as a purely mechanical check on what risks … becoming an infinite proliferation of detail” [20, p. 142]. Here, despite his conventional insistence on Ulysses as the paradigmatic modernist text, Jameson’s reading practice seeks to move past orthodox ways of interpreting Joyce’s formal devices. Intriguingly, while his reading here refers back to a narrative of increased reification in capitalist society, the focus returns to the colonial aspects of Joyce’s Dublin and questions the position of private individuals, “given the extraordinary relativization of all individual experience, and the transformation of its contents into so many purely psychological reactions” [20, p. 150]. Similarly, Jameson’s discussion of Conrad invokes a host of interpretive practices surrounding Lord Jim and Nostromo, listing “myth critical”, Freudian, “ego-psychological”, existential, Nietzschean and “structuraltextual” examples of and avenues for criticism [12, pp. 208–209]. Jameson references several critics in footnotes for each of these types of interpretation, where he includes scholars such as Albert J. Guérard, J. Hillis Miller, Bernard Myer, Edward Said and Ian Watt [12, pp. 208– 209n6]. The critical works he references span a period from the early 1960s up until the mid-1970s. Characteristically, across over seventy pages on Conrad, Jameson does not engage with this contemporaneous work in any sustained manner. His work does, however, seek to place these interpretive options in a wider historical context, in order to assert a larger narrative of capitalist development: “The burden of our reading of Lord Jim has been to restore the whole socially concrete subtext of late nineteenth-century rationalization and reification of which the novel is so powerfully … the expression and Utopian compensation alike” [12, p. 266]. At the same time, Jameson often discusses an “ideology of modernism”, a set of preconceptions that he sees in contemporary critical practices. In “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism”, Jameson defines this notion in more explicit terms, whereby “a coherent and quite systemic ideology … imposes its conceptual limitations on our aesthetic thinking and our taste and judgments, and in

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its own way projects an utterly distorted model of literary history” [34, p. 417]. As in his discussion of Barthes’ “reality effect”, Jameson criticises work that brings a modernist context to literary forms that were written in different historical situations: “I simply want to underscore the limits of the ideology of modernism to account for the great realistic works, and to suggest that to prove Dickens was really a symbolist … Balzac a myth-maker and George Eliot some Victorian version of Henry James if not even of Dostoevsky, is an intellectually dishonest operation that skirts all the real issues” [34, p. 420]. Jameson’s imperative in these moments is once again one of metacommentary, which insists on a more self-reflexive view of history and the situated nature of any interpretive practice. A Singular Modernity seeks to further delineate the manner in which an ideology of modernism was formed. Here, Jameson discusses the heterogeneity of the earlier modernist moment, before considering the late modernist canonisation process: “in the moderns … form is never given in advance: it is generated experimentally in the encounter, leading on into formations that could never have been predicted (and whose … interminable multiplicities the innumerable high modernisms amply display)” [5, p. 208]. For Jameson, this defining of the modern only begins with the canonisation of the high moderns by the late moderns. He contrasts the more varied high-modernist moment with the “modest … aesthetic autonomies of the late modern” and claims that this latter moment allow not only the “possibility for that theorization that we have characterized as the ideology of modernism, it also enables and authorizes the production of … [the] middlebrow type” [5, pp. 209–210]. In A Singular Modernity, this process—whereby the various experiments of the high modernists are turned into the formal categories of the novel for the late modernists—also influences the modernist cannon as it is formulated in this period: “The canon is simply modernism, as the late modernists have selected and rewritten it in their own image” [5, pp. 209–210]. Jameson reads the development of theories of modernism in academia across the 1960s and 1970s as similarly affected by this more middlebrow and easily categorised moment. As a result, these theories do not satisfactorily deal with the multiplicity and invention of the earlier period and become one of the major reasons for our inability to properly define the modern. Through this discussion, Jameson aims to move beyond a metacommentary that comments on what Wegner has recently called “theoretical modernism”. As this particular ideology of the modern is

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perhaps no longer a dominant component of literary criticism, Jameson instead turns to more thoroughly historicising its development. Nevertheless, we must observe another valence to this critical operation. Jameson’s interaction with ideologies of the modern is refracted through an ongoing engagement with several early Western Marxists and their differing views of modernism. Disagreements between Ernst Bloch and Lukács over German Expressionism in the late 1930s—along with Bertolt Brecht’s posthumously published responses to this debate— began an ongoing discussion of the nature of modernist cultural material that involves contributions from Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Brecht, amongst others. These earlier critics’ discussions and their ongoing reception often influence Jameson’s mediation between varying positions on high modernism. They have also influenced the specific aspects of the period that Jameson has concentrated on in his readings of modernist literature, and the way he inserts himself into a more contemporary field of theoretical discussion. Aesthetics and Politics (1977) collects essays from these debates between the aforementioned Marxists, and Jameson contributes an afterword, offering a keen sense of the landscape that he inherits. The text engages thoroughly with the European reception of these theorists, before we encounter Jameson’s own reframing of the scholarly debates. In comparison with the work in Marxism and Form—which is more invested in an American perception of Western Marxists and uses their work as a starting point in which to perform its own dialectical performances—Aesthetics and Politics offers a broader sense of Jameson’s relationship to his Western Marxist influences. Here, Jameson describes the arguments between Bloch, Lukács and others, claiming that: “Much of the fascination of these jousts … comes from the internal dynamism by which all the logical possibilities are rapidly generated in turn, so that it quickly extends beyond the local phenomenon of Expressionism … to draw within its scope the problems of popular art, naturalism, socialist realism, avant-gardism, media and finally modernism” [34, p. 134]. In many cases, the subjects and ideas listed here are integral to Jameson’s own construction of periods. His essays on Thomas Mann, for instance, while only mentioning these theorists in passing, are highly concerned with Mann’s relationship to realism, high modernism and popular culture in a way that interacts with Lukács’ perception of the novelist especially.

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Across his career, Jameson has often attempted to reconcile the dialectical style of Adorno’s writing with the more rigorous systematic intentions of Lukács, particularly in a book such as The Political Unconscious . He attempts to reframe the work of the two theorists in other moments in his career. While strongly indebted to Lukács’ theory of reification as discussed in History and Class Consciousness , Jameson generally positions high modernism in a different relation to the process than the earlier critic. And while he is indebted to Adorno’s sense of superstructures, Jameson’s sense of the subversive potential of high modernism is much more tempered. Ultimately, this negotiation of the two positions is a governing factor in Jameson’s wavering attribution of the political possibility of modernism. The moment in The Political Unconscious where he discusses the “accumulated reification” of high modernism is a moment more obviously indebted to Lukács. A few years earlier, however, in Fables of Aggression, Jameson is more diplomatic. He contrasts “Lukács’ apologia for nineteenth-century realism, in which modernism is denounced as the symptom … of the reification of late capitalist social relations” with the work of Adorno and others where “the formal innovations of modernism are to be understood as essentially revolutionary acts, and in particular as the repudiation of the values of a business society” [11, pp. 13–14]. Jameson notes, however, that these two readings are not necessarily mutually exclusive. He argues, instead, that modernism “reflects and reinforces such fragmentation and commodification of the psyche … but … the various modernisms all seek to overcome that reification as well, by the exploration of a new Utopian and libidinal experience of the various sealed realms or psychic compartments to which they are condemned” [11, pp. 13–14]. Jameson sees these theoretical impulses within the model of dominant, persistent and emerging historical modes—borrowed from Raymond Williams— allowing for heterogeneity in the moment of high modernism. Jameson ultimately sees the binary of reification and subversion as a tension or contradiction. In some ways, he more commonly displaces Lukács’ theorisation of German Expressionist literature onto the literature of a postmodern United States. For Jameson, cultural reification has expanded even further in this period, and he reads contemporary representations of reality in highly negative terms. In his earlier work, however—which is highly concerned with revitalising the canon of Western Marxism in a North American context—his writing inevitably discusses the nature of capitalism, reification and industrialisation in a similar manner to his larger

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influences. Fables of Aggression in particular is a reshuffling of the arguments of the earlier theorists, framing high modernism in the same kinds of contexts as that of Lukács, Adorno and Brecht. Beyond this complicated negotiation process, Jameson must also mediate between the Western Marxists and the landscape of contemporary theory. In “Reflections on the Brecht-Lukács Debate”, Jameson is highly concerned with how critics perceived Brecht and Lukács at the time of its publication. The essay considers the development of poststructuralism, as well as elaborating on the political nuances of an ongoing Marxist reception of the two figures. For example: It is Lukács as partisan, less of specific artistic style than of a particular critical method, who is the focus of a new polemics today…. Lukács’s own critical practice is in fact very much genre-orientated … and committed to the mediation of the various forms of literary discourse, so that it is a mistake to enlist him in the cause of a naïve mimetic position that encourages us to discuss the events or characters of a novel, in the same way we would look at “real” ones…. It is clear that as long as Lukács is used as a rallying cry (or bogey man) in this particular methodological conflict, there is not much likelihood of any measured assessment of his work…. Brecht, meanwhile, is certainly much more easily rewritten in terms of concerns of the present, in which he seems to address us directly in an unmediated voice. [34, pp. 440–441]

Here, Jameson is particularly aware of the ways in which Lukács’ method might be interpreted in a contemporary field, conceding several of the weaknesses or incongruities with trends in academia at the time, but stressing what Jameson sees as a misreading. Throughout his career, he goes through this process of admitting to Lukács’ faults or unfashionable attributes in order to reframe the concepts that are useful to his theoretical project. At times, Jameson’s work on modernism does not move far beyond the initial ground of these early essays; it still wavers between the binary positions of reification and subversion, or merely repositions these tendencies in Weber’s theory of historical development. If we are to follow Gartman, Jameson’s engagement with high modernism is missing necessary nuances of uneven development and of cultural engagement. If, instead, we see Jameson’s work as attached to this lineage of Western Marxism—or position his earlier material more thoroughly within the field of theory at the time—it becomes clear that his engagement has enriched the earlier debates in a crucial manner. In the 1970s and 1980s,

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his repositioning of these Western Marxists was crucial to the resurgence of Marxism in the field of theory, but also redefined much of their work in the process. In this manner, his material on high modernism has the effect of reworking his theoretical forerunners into the context of poststructural thought and the field of theory, while aiming to remain committed to the principles of his influences. Combined with the way the period’s theorisation has remained intensely contested in contemporary theory, high modernism inevitably becomes both elusive and highly complex in Jameson’s own narrative of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Notes 1. It should be noted that Jameson is speaking of a broader concept or period of time here, that of “modernity”, or the modernisation process that begins several centuries earlier. Yet scholarly production on alternate modernities, predominantly working in a postcolonial context, has also often concentrated on early twentieth-century literatures, using terms such as alternate modernisms and geomodernisms. 2. It should be noted that the contemporary importance of Woolf to the modernist canon is once again overlooked here. 3. Note that this refers to the “Introductory Note” found in the earlier, two volume edition of The Ideologies of Theory, not the later, single volume edition predominantly cited throughout this book.

References 1. Donougho, Martin. “Postmodern Jameson.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner, 75–95. Washington DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 2. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. 3. Wegner, Philip. E. “Periodizing Jameson, or, Notes toward a Cultural Logic of Globalization.” In On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalism, edited by Caren Irr and Ian Buchanan, 241–280. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006. 4. Wegner, Phillip E. Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, The University, and the Desire for Narrative. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. 5. Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity. London: Verso, 2002. 6. Dunst, Alexander. Review of The Modernist Papers, by Fredric Jameson. Textual Practice 23, no. 1 (2008): 182–185. https://doi.org/10.1080/095 02360701841522.

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7. Horne, Haynes. “Jameson’s Strategies of Containment.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner, 268–300. Washington DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 8. Buchanan, Ian. Fredric Jameson: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2006. 9. Jameson, Fredric. Sartre: The Origins of a Style. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. First published 1961 by Yale University Press. 10. Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. 11. Jameson, Fredric. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkley: University of California Press, 1979. 12. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen, 1981. 13. Jameson, Fredric. “On Raymond Chandler.” In The Critical Response to Raymond Chandler, edited by J. Kenneth Van Dover, 65–87. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. 14. Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text, no. 15 (Autumn 1986): 65–88. https://doi.org/10. 2307/46649. 15. Lazarus, Neil. “Fredric Jameson on ‘Third-World Literature’: A Qualified Defence.” In Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader, edited by Sean Homer and Douglas Kellner, 42–61. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 16. Ahmad, Aijaz. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory.’” Social Text, no. 17 (Autumn 1987): 3–25. https://doi.org/10. 2307/466475. 17. Buchanan, Ian. “National Allegory Today: A Return to Jameson.” In On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalism, edited by Caren Irr and Ian Buchanan, 173–188. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 18. Doyle, Laura, and Laura Winkiel. “Introduction: The Global Horizons of Modernism.” In Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity edited by Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, 1–16. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. 19. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 20. Jameson, Fredric. The Modernist Papers. London: Verso, 2007. 21. Mepham, John. Virginia Woolf . Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1992. 22. Jameson, Fredric. “Modernism and Imperialism.” A Field Day Pamphlet, no. 14 (1988): 5–24. 23. Jameson, Fredric. “Modernism and Imperialism.” In Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, 43–68. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. 24. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013.

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25. Bennett, Bridget, Rachel Bowlby, Andrew Lawson, Mark Storey, Graham Thompson, and Fredric Jameson. “Roundtable. The Antinomies of Realism.” Journal of American Studies 48, no. 4 (2014): 1069–1086. https://doi. org/10.1017/s0021875814001376. 26. Gartman, David. “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of PostFordism?” The Sociological Quarterly 39, no. 1 (1998): 119–137. Accessed May 24, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/4121014. 27. Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. 28. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. 29. Berman, Jessica. “Modernism’s Possible Geographies.” In Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, edited by Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, 281–296. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. 30. Boer, Roland. “A Level Playing Field? Metacommentary and Marxism.” In On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalism, edited by Caren Irr and Ian Buchanan, 51–70. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. 31. Gross, David S. “Marxism and Resistance: Fredric Jameson and the Moment of Postmodernism.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner, 96–116. Washington DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 32. Tally Jr., Robert T. Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism. London: Pluto Press, 2014. 33. Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory. Vol. 2, The Syntax of History. London: Routledge, 1988. 34. Irr, Caren, and Ian Buchanan. Introduction to On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalism. Edited by Caren Irr and Ian Buchanan, 1–14. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.

CHAPTER 4

Jameson and Post-war Literature: Postmodernism, Utopia and the Collective

Fredric Jameson’s theories of postmodernism have had an extensive impact on scholarly discussions of post-war literature. As Amy Hungerford outlined in 2010, “critics such as Fredric Jameson, Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, Jean-François Lyotard, and others have defined the period by the … fractured narratives, ironic play, and aesthetic virtuosity of writers like Pynchon, Gaddis, Acker, DeLillo, and Barth and have looked to the economic substructures of culture as a way of understanding these aesthetic developments” [1, p. xix]. Hungerford contrasts these dominant trends in postmodern literary studies with a newer group of scholars including herself, Daniel Grausam, Mark McGurl, and Timothy Parrish. This group has aimed to move away from readings that concentrate on the economic or political dimensions of late capitalism. Within this cohort there has instead been a focus on notions of identity, spirituality and trauma in postmodernist literature. Despite Hungerford positioning Jameson in contrast to these newer lines of enquiry, it remains that he has rarely engaged with postmodern literature in any depth. Across his career, he has consistently avoided discussing what he calls the “high literary novel” after modernism. If high-modernist literature remains somewhat ambiguous within Jameson’s larger categories of history and literary development, the postmodern novel often occupies an even more marginal position. As discussed earlier in this book, the novel form remains the predominant focus of Jameson’s interpretive practice when discussing the nineteenth © The Author(s) 2020 J. Cogle, Jameson and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54824-7_4

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century and the modernist period. When he begins to concentrate on postmodernity, however, the novel becomes less central to his theoretical project. In Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984), Jameson discusses the architect John Portman and Andy Warhol at length. In comparison, his engagements with Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs are only short asides. In this work, Jameson theorises that changes to a variety of Western cultural forms reflect global political and economic developments. The marginalised position that literature occupies within this context sees Jameson less interested in the novel as cultural material. This pivot away from his earlier literary focus continues for more than a decade. This is particularly evident in his books published throughout the 1990s: Signatures of the Visible (1990), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), The Seeds of Time (1994) and The Cultural Turn (1998). These texts either discuss postmodernism in a general sense—with little engagement with the literary—or concentrate almost exclusively on cinema. In 2002, Jameson published A Singular Modernity, which signalled a return to literary studies in earnest. His next major work, Archaeologies of the Future (2005), continued in this fashion. During this period, however, his lack of interest in canonical postmodernist authors remained. More recently, The Antinomies of Realism (2013) has included discussions of contemporary authors such as David Mitchell, but Jameson does not see a novel such as Cloud Atlas (2004) in relationship to any canonical post-war texts. Elsewhere, he makes frequent but cursory mentions of certain postmodern authors including Burroughs, E. L. Doctorow and Pynchon. While these do not often represent sustained engagements, they provide some clues to Jameson’s views on postmodern literature. Running alongside these discussions of the postmodern literary novel, he has also produced a range of material on other kinds of post-war texts. Here the generic forms of the science fiction and detective novel have often interested him in ways that the high-literary novel no longer does. This chapter will seek to delineate how Jameson has positioned these varying literary forms throughout his career. The first section will concentrate on the limitations he has placed on the high-literary postmodern novel, and how these have influenced his broader conceptualisations of the period. Through this analysis, I will question whether elements of his work may still be useful for contemporary criticism that has pursued a more diverse understanding of postmodern literature. The second section

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will consider how Jameson’s readings of generic fiction articulate major notions of his theoretical project, such as cognitive mapping and utopian desire. Through this discussion, the chapter will outline the ways in which his textual preferences influence his theoretical project. While this work on generic fiction frequently constructs another set of problematic formal, generic or political boundaries, this chapter will conclude by considering his more recent work on contemporary generic forms, and the extent to which Jameson’s categorising operations have become more fluid over the past decade. This chapter will thus aim to illustrate the extent to which his later material might reconcile with ongoing developments in postcolonial studies, as well as to discuss how his more recent categories of the collective and discussions of the future offer new opportunities for interpretive work.

High Literature in Postmodernity Jameson sees Burroughs, Don DeLillo, Doctorow and Pynchon, amongst others, as postmodern “high literature”. The authors he mentions are similar to the ones Hungerford lists above. Critics have historically grouped them in a category of postmodernist literature, although more recently scholars have developed other terminology. In this manner, scholars have begun to use categories such as “metafiction” or “the American post-war novel”. In contrast, Jameson stresses these authors’ debt to high modernism. While he has occasionally discussed a sense that postmodernity witnesses the blurring of high and low culture, he also claims that authors such as Pynchon and Doctorow continue in a lineage of “residual elite culture in our own postmodern age” [2, p. 152]. As this book has demonstrated so far, Jameson’s textual interests often align with a decidedly conventional, “high literary” version of the canon. By the time of postmodernity, however, this sense of cultural division has become problematic for Jameson. Despite their classification as highliterary figures, the postmodernists are unable to escape the reification of the cultural sphere. Jameson notes that the fiction “is popular: maybe not in mid-Western towns, but in the dominant world of fashion and mass media. That can only mean … that there has come to be something socially useful about art from the point of view of the existing socio-economic structure; or something deeply suspect about it” [3, pp. 413–414]. The utopian gesture afforded to James Joyce and other modernists is entirely absent here. In contrast, the postmodernists write

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within a culture that treats literature predominantly as a commodity, even as they remain beholden to certain outdated, high-modernist modes. Despite his ambivalence towards this kind of fiction, however, Jameson regularly mentions canonical postmodern authors in order to provide brief, instructive examples of the field. He describes Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) as a “fundamental paradigm”, for example [4, p. 388]. He has also written on Doctorow on a few occasions. While claiming to enjoy novels such as Ragtime (1975) and The Book of Daniel (1971), Jameson also focuses on their articulation of a specifically postmodern problem—the impossibility of representing history. He also appears to continue to consume this type of literature: he has mentioned David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) as well as the stories of Alexander Kluge, amongst others [see 4, p. 386; 5, pp. 187–192]. On occasion, Jameson has also claimed the French nouveau roman is “the last significant innovation in the novel” [2, p. xv]. He has only worked on the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, however, in a few short essays. We should also note that Jameson establishes his interest in the nouveau roman well before his early articles on postmodernism. In this regard, Jameson’s publications prior to 1983 become important texts when considering his engagement with the postmodern novel. While Jameson’s essays in the 1980s provided comprehensive articulations of postmodernity, his work throughout the 1970s had already outlined many key theories relating to the historical period. This is obscured, however, by the fact that postmodernity and postmodernism were emerging concepts when his initial discussions of authors such as Pynchon and Robbe-Grillet were being published. In these moments, Jameson does not often use the term postmodernity, but still discusses the historical moment in a manner that reflects his later articles. In Marxism and Form, for example, he discusses a new “coherent culture with which we are all familiar: John Cage’s music, Andy Warhol’s movies, novels by Burroughs, plays by Beckett, Godard, camp, Norman O. Brown, psychedelic experiences; and no critique can have any binding force which does not begin by submitting to the fascination of all these things as stylizations of reality” [3, p. 413]. At this point, these kinds of texts still have an aesthetic and political potential for Jameson. He claims that “insofar as we are Americans, none of us can fail to react to such things as pop art which admirably express the tangible and material realities, the specificity of that American life which is ours” [3, p. 414]. Later, when Jameson

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discusses pop art in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, he claims, “Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes … no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh’s footgear; indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all” [2, p. 8]. We can connect this more open discussion of postmodern authors to the looser definitions of modernism and postmodernism that Jameson works with throughout the period. In “Modernism and Its Repressed; or, Robbe-Grillet as Anti-Colonialist” (1976), for example, he uses the term modernism throughout. He will later describe Robbe-Grillet specifically as a postmodernist author. In “On Raymond Chandler” (1970), Jameson likewise states that Robbe-Grillet and Vladimir Nabokov are both “chief practitioners of art-for-art’s sake in the recent novel” [6, p. 66]. He will later see Nabokov as contributing predominantly to the late modernist period. Similarly, in “Metacommentary” (1971), Jameson describes Burroughs’s Naked Lunch as an example of the emerging “plotless” novel [7, p. 12]. Later, in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979), this focus will shift. It is here that Jameson describes Pynchon as producing “post-modernist literary texts” [8, p. 14]. Jameson may make several comments that suggest an ironic distance from these new literary forms in the 1970s, but he is still somewhat interested in discussing specific novels and authors. By the early 1990s and the publication of the book Postmodernism, however, he has a strongly defined sense of the period and his interest in the kind of North American post-war novel represented by Pynchon and others has declined. Jameson discusses Nabokov on occasion and writes briefly on the nouveau roman in a short chapter in Postmodernism. Authors such as Burroughs, on the other hand, rarely appear in Jameson’s work. The fact that Jameson has not typically discussed the postmodern novel in depth, however, allows for a reappraisal of this cultural form’s relationship to his understanding of postmodernity. As discussed above, scholars such as Amy Hungerford and Timothy Parrish have worked towards new readings of post-war literary criticism—arguing for a move away from Jameson’s conceptualisation of the period in the process. Hungerford, for example, argues for scholarship that “sidesteps the cultural materialist accounts of postmodernism that have been so powerful in defining the field—specifically, Fredric Jameson’s argument about the relationship between culture and late capitalism in Postmodernism” [9, p. 413]. Yet, as I will discuss further below, scholars continue to produce illuminating work on the post-war novel while borrowing from

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Jameson’s work on postmodernity. Contemporary criticism must now operate from a different historical perspective to Jameson’s initial work on postmodernism. This is especially evident in work that discusses the postpostmodern, which does not necessarily “helplessly iterate and perpetually enact Jameson’s concern that aesthetic creation and commodity production have become the same thing”, as Timothy Parrish claims [10, p. 646]. Given that Jameson’s work on postmodernity often ignores the literature of the period, it would also seem relevant to discuss how the novel functions in this historical context in comparison with architecture, film and visual art. This is especially relevant when considering representations of interiority or personal political engagement. At this stage, and despite his impact on the field, a further consideration of Jameson’s characterisations of postmodernity and its literature seems necessary. Jameson has often argued that criticism should not concentrate on aesthetic worth. For example, in Postmodernism, he claims I write as a relatively enthusiastic consumer of postmodernism.… I like the architecture and a lot of the newer visual work.… The music is not bad to listen to, or the poetry to read; the novel is the weakest of the newer cultural areas and is considerably excelled by its narrative counterparts in film and video (at least the high literary novel is; subgeneric narratives, however, are very good, indeed, and in the Third World of course all this falls out very differently).… These are tastes, giving rise to opinions; they have little to do with the analysis of the function of such a culture and how it got to be that way. [2, pp. 298–299]

In this moment, Jameson claims that his enjoyment of specific forms has no influence on the theoretical frameworks he applies to the period. He then moves on to critique scholars who have focused on the aesthetic worth of postmodern cultural material—particularly those that compare postmodernism to realism or modernism. This tendency is perhaps best illustrated in “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate” (1984), where he discusses the contrasting views of Lyotard and Manfredo Tafuri. Here, Jameson’s intention is to place differing critical positions in a broader historical context: Most of the political positions which we have found to inform what is most often conducted as an aesthetic debate are in reality moralizing ones that seek to develop final judgments on the phenomenon of postmodernism.…

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But a genuinely historical and dialectical analysis of such phenomena … cannot afford the impoverished luxury of such absolute moralizing judgments.… The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt. [11, p. 29]

While Jameson’s descriptions of postmodernity in terms of capitalist development and “depthlessness” are now more well-known, this argument represented a significant shift in scholarly approaches to postmodernism at the time. Despite this imperative, however, his approach to the postmodern novel demonstrates how his theoretical frameworks often mirror his preferences for specific texts. His discussion of authors such as Doctorow and Pynchon, for example, frequently outlines the limited extent to which the postmodern novel is able to perform any kind of meaningful critique of the historical and political situation of late capitalism. From Jameson’s Marxist position, this lack of political efficacy is obviously a negative and critical assessment. In this regard, there is a sense that his articulation of political possibility in postmodern cultural material aligns with his own aesthetic preferences. This would appear to contradict his argument that discussions of postmodernity should aim to ignore notions of cultural worth. As discussed earlier in this book, critics have often portrayed this aspect of Jameson’s work as a nostalgia for older cultural forms. By instead concentrating on how his literary interests are connected to his broader depictions of postmodernity, however, we might come to a more nuanced understanding of how his engagement with cultural forms impacts on his theoretical frameworks for the period. Throughout his career, Jameson has considered scholarly and popular reception of cultural forms. In this capacity, he often aligns the acceptance and proliferation of certain texts and genres with their relationship to the political unconscious. This is illustrated in the essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture”, in which he compares the film Jaws (1975) with the Peter Benchley novel from which it was adapted. His reading shows how modifications to certain major characters allow the film to represent a different set of class conflicts: [The novel] provides us with a striking illustration of a whole work of displacement by which the written narrative of an essentially class fantasy has been transformed, in the Hollywood product, into something quite different.… Gone is the whole … aristocratic brooding over death, along

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with the erotic rivalry in which class antagonisms were dramatized; the Hooper of the film is nothing but a technocratic whiz-kid, no tragic hero but instead a good-natured creature of grants … and scientific knowhow. But Brody has also undergone an important modification: he is no longer the small-town island boy … rather he has been transformed into a retired cop from New York City, relocating on Nantucket in an effort to flee the hassle of urban crime, race war, and ghettoization. The figure of Brody now therefore introduces overtones … of law-and-order, rather than yankee shrewdness, and functions as a tv police-show hero transposed into this apparently more sheltered but in reality equally contradictory milieu which is the great American summer vacation. [8, pp. 27–28]

For Jameson, this more broadly resonant subtext ensures the film has a wider appeal than the paperback, and has a major impact on the film’s importance as a text. Its position as an early example of the “blockbuster” and continued prominence in our reception of film history becomes tied to its expression of certain twentieth-century tendencies and tensions. Elsewhere, Jameson commonly discusses a broad variety of textual elements using a narrative of emergence and regression. He frequently discusses character tropes, formal innovations or symbolic gestures using this framework, in order to demonstrate their relationship to the historical situation that surrounds them. Even though these moments are often revelatory in Jameson’s work, they often demonstrate how his personal tastes—particularly when discussing the novel—impact on his sense of historical change. High literature’s limited ability to represent postmodernity becomes entwined with its apparent decline in prominence in popular culture and other cultural hierarchies. For Jameson, the novels of Burroughs, Doctorow, Pynchon and others no longer articulate the changed cultural landscape in the same way a film like Jaws can. The subsequent loss of importance of this kind of novel in the cultural sphere reflects these limitations. Elsewhere, Jameson argues against scholarship that valorises or diminishes periods of literature in relationship to one another. Nevertheless, he has typically framed his interest in the realist or high-modernist novel in relation to the ability of their formal qualities to express the political unconscious of the period. While he might argue that judgements of cultural worth or aesthetic value should not inform Marxist criticism, it remains that his work often ties discussions of formal innovation with the novel’s ability to express deeper political realities. As such, his theory must be intrinsically influenced by

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notions of taste, if we are to consider the form of a novel, its plot or its subtext as in any way tied to our aesthetic appreciation of a text. These aesthetic preferences lead to several moments where Jameson restricts the conceptual valences of the literary novel in favour of more generic forms. For example, in “Philip K. Dick, In Memoriam” (1982), he states that it is “the inauthenticity … of Science Fiction that gives it one signal advantage over modernist high literature. The latter can show us everything about the individual psyche and its subjective experience and alienation, save the essential—the logic of stereotypes, reproductions and depersonalization in which the individual is held in our own time” [4, p. 348].1 This argument does elide the sense that novels by authors like DeLillo and Doctorow are frequently concerned with stereotypes or generic character tropes. For instance, DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) focuses on the dissonance that Jack Gladney experiences as he moves through—and attempts to act in—his suburban environment. His efforts to occupy a position of authority as an academic and father are persistently undercut by the meaninglessness and absurdity of the postmodern world he inhabits. Jameson also works to limit the extent to which the postmodern novel can do political work. In Postmodernism, he claims that Doctorow’s Ragtime cannot recreate the past, rather “it can only ‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about that past.… If there is any realism left here, it is a “realism” that is meant to derive from the shock of … slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history” [2, p. 25]. Jameson often defines postmodern literature in terms of what it lacks: here it is a Lukácsian sense of mimetic realism that has the ability to map society and history in politically productive fashion. In this context, Ragtime becomes a literary example of the “nostalgia film”. For Jameson, films that recreate the past have the effect of replacing a sense of historical development with “the history of aesthetic style” [2, p. 20]. In these prescriptive moments, Jameson’s work limits the critical capacity of post-war cultural material, as well as its ability to conceptualise specific problems of the postmodern. This tendency is perhaps most obvious in his discussion of Andy Warhol. Jameson claims Warhol’s work expresses a problem of postmodernity, yet does not allow for the sense that Warhol’s work is an articulation or investigation of that problem. In Postmodernism, Jameson claims that Warhol’s screen-prints, “which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical

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political statements. If they are not that, then one would surely want to know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the possibilities of political … art in the postmodern period” [2, p. 9]. In this moment, Jameson accepts that these texts are about the role of media in postmodern society and the commodification of the image, but refutes their political power. Even as they express a particular component of the historical situation, this reading is limited by the fact that Jameson does not find the works “powerful”. The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel that similarly delineates certain aspects of the postmodern moment. Pynchon’s novel conceptualises specific problems regarding language and its relationship with truth or reality. A novel that performs this kind of work does not necessarily align with “the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms” in the same way that a “nostalgia film” might [2, p. 9]. As discussed above, we need to consider the historical moment in which Jameson is working. At this stage, postmodernism and postmodernity are not as well developed as concepts, and scholars do not always clearly distinguish between the two terms. Jameson will eventually make clearer distinctions between postmodernism as a cultural form and postmodernity as a historical period [see 12, pp. 101–102]. Nevertheless, the notion of a cultural dominant in his work needs further consideration. For Jameson, the historical situation of postmodernity has a decisive influence on the cultural material of the period. He uses the film American Graffiti (1973) as an illustration of the depthlessness he sees in postmodernist cinema, given its flattening of history into a re-creation of late 1950s and early 1960s aesthetics. While we might categorise the film as postmodern in this regard, the film still uses a coming of age narrative that emphasises a series of more traditional cultural norms—particularly ones related to interpersonal relationships and education. Even in this period of postmodernity, these values remain dominant. In contrast, Jameson’s notion of a “waning of affect” is only an emergent cultural trend. Similarly, a major Hollywood film of this kind is inevitably more pervasive than metafiction by authors such as Pynchon. Further to this, the postmodernist novel often works to engage with and critique the kinds of cultural values that a film like American Graffiti presents to the viewer as known and accepted. As mentioned above, novels by DeLillo, Doctorow and Pynchon are not typically valorisations of postmodernity’s loss of meaning. Even if there is pleasure or enjoyment to be derived from

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the irony of postmodern depthlessness in post-war fiction, these novels are often also engaged with the conceptual problems of the period. For Jameson, however, this critical function of postmodern literature does not set the novel apart from the nostalgia film. To understand this tendency, we might also look at the academic debates that Jameson is engaging with. In Postmodernism, for example, he describes a contemporaneous period of cultural theory and literary studies that remains heavily influenced by poststructuralist theory: It must not have the appearance of making primary statements.… This reflects the widespread feeling that inasmuch as everything we utter is a moment in a larger chain or context, all statements that seem to be primary are in fact only links in some larger “text.” … This feeling also entails another one … namely, that we can never go far enough back to make primary statements, that there are no conceptual … beginnings, and that the doctrine of … foundations is somehow intolerable as a testimony to the inadequacies of the human mind. [2, p. 392]

Jameson has made later concessions to the discourse of theory. In 2009, he stated, “I remain committed … to the ongoing significance and vitality of that discourse called theory, which I have identified elsewhere as the construction of a language beyond that of traditional philosophy, and offering at least one possible contemporary equivalent of what used to be called the dialectic” [7, p. x]. At the time of Postmodernism, however, he is more wary of aspects of poststructuralist theory that he defines as antiinterpretive or anti-historicist. Seen from this vantage point, it becomes understandable why he is disinclined to discuss high-postmodernist novels that often seem to be in conversation with poststructuralism. Limiting these novels to their expression of poststructuralist ideas similar to that of Barthes or Foucault, however, is a repudiation of their other qualities. While Jameson has called for more nuanced and expansive readings of authors such as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Émile Zola, his brief and prescriptive engagements with the postmodern novel often work to limit the interpretive possibilities. In his later work on Thomas Pynchon, Casey Shoop sketches an accepted reading of The Crying of Lot 49 that aligns with Jameson’s approach to postmodern literature. Shoop claims that Pynchon’s novel has “become something of a postmodern procedural, with the novel

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modeling its own methods of interpretation, such that its refusal to mean has been taken, paradoxically, for its Meaning. Oedipa is captive to the enchantments of signification itself.… This focus on textuality is punctuated by the novel’s famous, final refusal to mean” [13, p. 54]. Shoop writes against this type of interpretation by engaging with the text’s notion of paranoia. He claims that “restoring Pynchon to history and history to Pynchon reveals that paranoia is not simply a condition of interpretive dysfunction or illness but the prospective ground of new political agency in his work and in the period more broadly” [13, p. 52]. Shoop traces a history of the New Right in California that is visible in The Crying of Lot 49, at the same time as demonstrating how the Right adapts to the loss of meaning experienced in post-war Western society. Shoop notes how the Right’s approach to this issue differs to that of the Left, which has the “tendency to posit the mere knowledge that truth and reference claims have become problematic as itself a progressive political notion” [13, p. 58]. In contrast, conservatism becomes a binary, paranoid framework for understanding the world, as exemplified by the Right-wing operatives found in Pynchon’s novels: The paranoid style of the New Right concedes the possibility that there are other orders of being which threaten and perhaps control this one, so that it needs actively to cultivate its own images in order to compete. More to the point, this complementary anxiety on the right is vital to an understanding of paranoia in Pynchon’s California novels, which span the period of Reagan’s ascendance. Paranoia is not merely the occasion for an allegorical exercise in hermeneutic uncertainty but also an exploration of a precise cultural-historical situation: the 1960s California of The Crying of Lot 49 is the state of representational breakdown.… As such, California was also the place where the Right reacted most powerfully to this crisis, offering counter projections to recontain diversity within the logic of cold war binarism.… Pynchon’s parodic portrayals of New Right activism reveal it to be anything but traditional in its engagement with this crisis. [13, p. 65].

For Shoop, The Crying of Lot 49 demonstrates how the Right mobilises representations of the 1950s in this new paranoid world view. Tellingly, Shoop references Postmodernism, particularly Jameson’s sense of the “shift from the realities of the 1950s to the representation of that rather different thing, the ‘fifties’” [2, p. 281]. Shoop claims that The Crying of Lot 49’s “parodic use of cultural signifiers to index the previous era …

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suggests that the ‘fifties’ already belongs within the quotation marks that would offset its status as representation” [13, p. 66n]. As such, Shoop’s reading aligns with Jameson’s reservations about poststructuralist interpretations of postmodern texts. He uses some of Jameson’s broader ideas regarding the period, but comes from a more contemporary perspective. In doing so, Shoop works through the tensions between historical modes that Jameson discusses in The Political Unconscious . This allows for more nuance than the “eternal present” that Jameson discusses in Postmodernism. The reading also works to position Jameson’s work in better alignment with scholars such as Daniel Grausam. In the last decade, Grausam has claimed that while “our sense that the post-1945 American canon has solidified … our categories for analyzing the period are otherwise still taking shape” [14, p. 401]. Grausam and other critics like Hungerford and Parrish have worked to combat readings that reiterate some of Jameson’s most famous notions of the period and its literature. This group of scholars has focused on the psychological, racial and spiritual aspects of the post-war novel, amongst other topics. In doing so, they have aimed at “complicating these grand narratives of an age and a literature axiomatically sceptical of grand narratives” [14, p. 399]. While emphasising the importance of these new kinds of readings, Grausam argues against Jameson’s notion of historical depthlessness. Shoop’s interpretation of The Crying of Lot 49, however, articulates how Jameson’s writing on postmodernism—as well as historical change more broadly—might remain important for our engagement with the period’s literature. Further to this, Shoop’s work on Pynchon highlights a limitation of Jameson’s engagement with postmodern cultural material. Considering Jameson’s resistance to specific aspects of poststructuralism, we can see how he might be less interested in the postmodern novel. Nevertheless, while Jameson points to the restrictions in a scholarly discourse dominated by poststructuralist ideas, his work does little to expand how we might think about postmodern literature beyond this kind of interpretation. Even novels with more overt political intentions are restricted in this capacity in Jameson’s work. This is particularly noticeable in his brief discussions of Doctorow. In early readings of Ragtime and The Book of Daniel , scholars were predominantly interested in describing their postmodern aspects [see 15, 16, 17]. For example, both Paul Levine and John G. Parks focused on Ragtime and its integration of historical figures into a fictional narrative, as well as how the novel foregrounds

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its own textuality. Jameson’s reading in Postmodernism performs many of the same operations, where he states that Doctorow is “the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past, of the suppression of older traditions and moments of the American tradition: no one with left sympathies can read these splendid novels without a poignant distress that is an authentic way of confronting our own current political dilemmas in the present” [2, pp. 24–25]. Despite this attention to the political elements of Doctorow’s novels, Jameson ties Ragtime particularly to his sense that the postmodern novel is unable to represent the past, or to critique the contemporary historical mode. As discussed above, within the context of Jameson’s Marxist theoretical frameworks, this lack of a critical component diminishes the work. In this capacity, his work on postmodern literature mirrors Lukacs’ work on modernism. Jameson states that “Ragtime remains the most peculiar and stunning monument to the aesthetic situation engendered by the disappearance of the historical referent” [2, p. 25]. This argument works in opposition to a reading like Linda Hutcheon’s, who foregrounds the political intent of Ragtime as well as its engagement with history [see 18, pp. 61–62]. Instead, Jameson emphasises that Ragtime is a “seemingly realistic novel [which] is in reality a nonrepresentational work that combines fantasy signifiers from a variety of ideologemes in a kind of hologram” [2, p. 23]. For Jameson, this inauthentic realism inevitably reduces the text’s ability to produce any kind of cognitive map for the reader. While this kind of reading points to the difficulty for cultural material to perform political work in the period of postmodernity, it also fails to engage with the text’s own contemporary context. For example, Jameson briefly discusses the character of Coalhouse in Ragtime as an example of postmodern intertextuality. Coalhouse’s name and narrative closely mirror that of the German novella Michael Kohlhauss (1810), but the reader is invited to make connections, beyond other literary works. Coalhouse is a black musician who forms a militant group after having his car torched by a local fire chief. Set in the first decade of the twentieth century, the text nevertheless engages with history more contemporaneous to the novel’s production, including the Civil Rights movement or the establishment of the Black Panther Party. Similarly, the narrative of the character Tateh asks the reader to reflect on the industrial production of cultural material in the twentieth century. Jameson instead reinforces a poststructuralist reading of the text, by claiming the novel makes the same “repudiation of interpretation … fundamental [to] poststructuralist theory” [2, p. 23]. While arguing

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against this type of analysis, Jameson claims that Doctorow’s novels only have the capacity to reinforce poststructuralist theories of culture. Doctorow’s novels highlight another aspect of postmodern experience similarly ignored in Jameson’s readings of postmodern texts. The subject does not necessarily enter into postmodernity’s crisis of the real with a mere “waning” of affect, but often with a sense of anxiety. Shoop’s work details how right-wing operatives are well positioned to capitalise on this anxiety, while the subject’s desire for unity is discussed at length in critical theory. This critical work often concentrates on problems of subjective experience and has drawn extensively on the work of Lacan, as well as a text Jameson references often: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Jameson references Lacan’s notion of schizophrenia to describe postmodernity, but his work often downplays problems of subjectivity in his famous articulations of the period. As seen in his discussion of films such as American Graffiti and elsewhere, Jameson sees nostalgia as working against the possibility of a cognitive map. Yet, he does not engage with the reasons why nostalgia becomes so prevalent in postmodern cultural material, or the psychological or political desires behind this change. Thinking through this notion of nostalgia, however, might allow us to frame the notion of history that Doctorow’s novel present us with in a more complex fashion. In doing so, we might arrive at the more developed sense of historical mapping that Jameson sees in realism and high modernism. Instead, this opportunity is minimised in his reading of Doctorow’s novels. By concentrating predominantly on Ragtime, Jameson also elides a detailed discussion of postmodern subjectivity. Ragtime’s characters are often presented as archetypal. The main family members being named “Father”, “Mother” and so on, while their interiority is presented to the reader with a sense of distance. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel , on the other hand, is a postmodern text very much preoccupied with notions of subjectivity and identity. Even as it plays with notions of intertextuality or representations of the past and history—and is thoroughly postmodern in these terms—it remains focused on how subjectivity, trauma and late capitalism intersect. In The Book of Daniel , Daniel analyses the world of late capitalism as he travels to different parts of the United States. He critiques the naivety and hypocrisy of various countercultural values, as the same time as performing symptomatic readings of a hegemonic mainstream culture. He is particularly interested in advertising, as well as the aesthetics of retail environments. For example: “In the window an advertising cutout

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faded from the sun: a modern housewife, smartly turned out in a dress that reaches almost to her ankles. She has her hand on the knob of a radio and does not look at it but out at you.… She is a slim … woman for whom the act of turning on an orange radio is enormous pleasure” [19, p. 38]. In this regard, we might read Daniel’s ironic descriptions of North American social values as quintessentially postmodern. If we pay attention to Daniel’s marginality in society, however, these postmodern elements acquire an additional complexity. Daniel often draws attention to the pretences of a culture that claims to provide “liberty and justice for all” but has also executed his parents after a secretive and seemingly unconstitutional trial. In this fashion, the novel mixes postmodern irony with deep-seated trauma and paranoia. Over the course of the novel, Daniel becomes better able to recognise these aspects of his psyche, as well as to acknowledge his sister’s depression. At one stage in this narrative development, his play with language and meaning abruptly breaks into abstract free association: “Treason against the U.S. shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them Aid & Comfort.… The decision to impose constitutional safeguards on treason prosecutions formed part of a broad emerging American tradition of liberalism.… No American has ever been executed for treason against his country,” says Nathaniel Weyl, TREASON: THE STORY OF DISLOYALTY AND BETRAYAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY, published in the year 1950. I say IF THIS BE TREASON MAKE THE MOST OF IT! If this bee is tristante make the mort of it If this be the reason make a mulch of it. If this brie is in season drink some milk with it. [19, p. 168]

That this moment occurs in a discussion of treason and the legal processes that impacted on his parent’s execution emphasises the relationship between Daniel’s trauma and his sense that language and culture are faulty constructs. As the novel comes to a conclusion, Daniel begins to make decisions and acknowledge his emotions. This stands in contrast to the beginning of the narrative, where Daniel analyses his family history and remains removed from the action. In the last section of the text, Daniel attends his sister’s funeral and pays several men to read the Kaddish. The men talk over each other as they pray at the same time, creating a babble of noise. In response, Daniel claims, “I think I am going to be able to cry” [19, p. 302]. Language again becomes nonsensical, but in this moment is

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also cathartic for Daniel. In Jameson’s most famous work on postmodernity, he often seems to reduce the extent to which emotional experience remains important to or even possible for the postmodern subject. The Book of Daniel , on the other hand, demonstrates how our investment in traditional values is persistent throughout this period. Its central character has a familiar approach to postmodernity’s crisis of meaning, one that foregrounds detachment and irony. Yet, Daniel’s traumatic relationship to the cultural dominant demonstrates the extent to which these traditional values continue to impact on our interiority and subconscious in a significant fashion. Postmodern novels such as DeLillo’s White Noise or Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick (1997) also investigate these competing tendencies in the postmodern subject. In this regard, postmodern literature is able to delineate certain aspects of postmodern experience unavailable to Jameson’s most commonly referenced examples drawn from film, architecture or science fiction. As such, there remains an opportunity for these readings of postmodern subjectivity—or the political and cultural moments this kind of novel focuses on—to interact with the historicised understanding of postmodernism that Jameson articulates. Postmodern literary studies might, for example, relate the work of Grausam on postmodern fiction and fear of nuclear war with the larger notions of cultural and economic development found in Jameson. Similarly, Jameson’s narrative of historical development might add to Robert L. McLaughlin’s discussion of the return of “fiction that is placed in the social world” in what he calls “postpostmodern” literature [20, p. 59]. Jameson has often argued against criticism that reiterates Shoop’s sense of the “postmodern procedural”. Nevertheless, his limiting of the post-war novel has had the effect of denying interpretations of Pynchon and Doctorow as discussed above. In doing so, Hungerford and others have often found it necessary to write against a Jamesonian view of postmodernity. This restriction of the conceptual work that the postmodern novel can do, however, seems to be strongly linked to Jameson’s own personal preferences—as well as the somewhat negative perspective from which he writes during the 1980s and 1990s. With this in mind, a broader set of potential readings emerges, whereby analysis of post-war fiction can remain invested in Jameson’s theoretical and historical frameworks while integrating a wider set of interests, as well as a different historical vantage point. While a text like Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief makes efforts to focus on elements of post-war fiction less related to a Marxist sense of class and

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economics, Shoop’s work shows how the postmodern novel, previously viewed as ahistorical, expresses a variety of cultural and political changes. Throughout his career, Jameson has claimed that interpretation of texts must be thoroughly historicised. While he has often provided these kinds of readings of realist novels in particular, he has not done so for postmodern literature. Ironically, for scholars of the postmodern novel to perform a similar kind of operation, they must move past Jameson’s influential articulations of the period.

Jameson and Genre Fiction: The Limits of Utopia More recently, Jameson has sought to reframe these early descriptions of postmodernity, both obliquely in The Antinomies of Realism and more explicitly in essays such as “The Aesthetics of Singularity” (2015). Nevertheless, this work has not extended to reconsider the canonical postmodern novels of Pynchon and others. Throughout his career, however, Jameson has regularly offered a differing vantage point from which to consider the post-war period. In this manner, his discussions of generic fiction have commonly served as a counterpoint to his more pessimistic portrayals of postmodern cultural material. Jameson concentrates on two specific types of genre novel in earnest: that of detective fiction and, more prominently, of science fiction. In both cases, these generic forms offer elements of the cognitive mapping operation. For Jameson, cognitive mapping is a process by which “we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as social confusion” [2, p. 54]. For example, he sees the detective fiction of Raymond Chandler as a later iteration of the social mapping found in realism, a procedure that is no longer available to high-postmodern literature. Science fiction, on the other hand, provides a historical perspective not available to other postmodern texts. In contrast to his work on Doctorow and the nostalgia film, Jameson claims that representations of the future allow for a more dialectical view of the present moment. He frames the science fiction novels of certain mid-twentieth-century writers—Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin and Stanislaw Lem in particular—as providing this perspective. Jameson has produced a lengthier consideration of the genre in one major text: Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005). The newer material found in the work uses examples from a long history of utopian

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and science fiction novels in order to discuss the limits of utopian imagination and desire. We should note that Jameson remains cautious in his privileging of these genres, and he often details the current difficulties for mapping operations or utopian thought. Once again, however, these operations rely on the construction of generic boundaries which he attributes Marxist valences. The following section will explore Jameson’s work on detective and science fiction in order to delineate the privileged relationships they occupy within his theory, and to better define his relationship to our own present. “On Raymond Chandler” (1970) is Jameson’s first extended discussion of genre fiction. Published a year before Marxism and Form, the article is also one of his first engagements with postmodernity, although he is several years away from using the term in his writing. Raymond Chandler published the majority of his most celebrated novels before the end of World War II. Nevertheless, Jameson sees their portrayals of California—and Los Angeles in particular—as early descriptions of a new social and cultural terrain: “By an accident of place, [Chandler’s] social content anticipates the realities of the fifties and sixties. For Los Angeles is already a kind of microcosm and forecast of the country as a whole: a new centerless city, in which the various classes have lost touch with each other because each is isolated in his own geographical compartment” [6, p. 69]. In the piece, Jameson contrasts detective fiction with contemporaneous developments in high literature. He claims: Since the War, the organic differences from region to region have been increasingly obliterated by standardization; and the organic social unity of each region has been increasingly fragmented and abstracted by the new closed lives of the individual family units, by the breakdown of cities and the dehumanization of transportation and of the media which lead from one monad to another.… If there is a crisis in American literature at present, it should be understood against the background of this ungrateful social material, in which only trick shots can produce the illusion of life. [6, p. 69]

In comparison, Jameson argues, “a case can be made for Chandler as a painter of American life; not as a builder of those large-scale models of the American experience which great literature offers, but rather in fragmentary pictures of setting and place, fragmentary perceptions which are by some formal paradox somehow inaccessible to serious literature” [6,

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p 67]. For Jameson, the detective is a figure who traverses a range of social and geographical terrain, offering a larger view of contemporary society than most individual subjective experiences: “Since there is no longer any privileged experience in which the whole of the social structure can be grasped, a figure must be invented who can be superimposed on the society as a whole.… The detective … fills the demands of the function of knowledge rather than that of lived experience: through him we are able to see, to know, the society as a whole” [6, p. 69]. In this manner, the essay represents an early consideration of cognitive mapping, even as larger senses of global capitalist frameworks do not enter the discussion. For Jameson, a sense of social disintegration in Western postmodernity already presents several challenges for cognition and aesthetic representation. Jameson’s work on science fiction, meanwhile, began in earnest in the mid-1970s, and the genre has become an important part of his theoretical project. Critics consider Jameson’s early articles on science fiction—most of which appeared in the journal Science Fiction Studies —as paradigmatic work in the field. The articles include “World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative” (1975), “After Armageddon: Character Systems in P. K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney” (1975) and “Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future” (1982). As John Duda notes, literary criticism of science fiction was “a field that had barely been established when … ‘Generic Discontinuities in SF: Brian Aldiss’ Starship’ … was first published in the second issue of the seminal journal Science Fiction Studies ” [21, p. 1245]. In this initial material, Jameson concentrates on particular groups of science fiction authors. He is primarily interested in “Golden Age” and “New Wave” writers working in the 1950s up until the 1970s. Throughout his career, Jameson discusses major figures from these eras, such as Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, J. G. Ballard, Dick, Le Guin, A. E. Van Vogt and many others. His work only occasionally considers earlier examples of the genre. As mentioned in the chapter on realism, he only offhandedly positions Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as science fiction’s inaugural text, and he rarely discusses figures such as Jules Verne. Similarly, Jameson remains less interested in “hard science fiction” and concentrates on more conceptual, psychological and experimental novels. For example, in a discussion of science fiction’s Golden Age, he claims: “Van Vogt’s work clearly prepares the way for that of the greatest of all Science Fiction writers, Philip K. Dick, whose … stories are

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inconceivable without the opening onto that play of unconscious materials and fantasy dynamics released by Van Vogt, and very different in spirit from the more hard-science aesthetic ideologies of his contemporaries” [4, p. 315]. Jameson’s appraisal of Dick, and his ongoing interest in the later fiction of Le Guin, Lem and William Gibson, reinforces this interest in science fiction’s conceptual abilities, rather than its engagement with technological development. In much of this early material, Jameson concentrates on notions of the present. He compares his chosen texts with high-literary examples and reads the science fiction visions of the future as allegorical of contemporary problems. For example, in “World Reduction in Le Guin”, he reads J. G. Ballard’s novels as translating “both physical and moral dissolution into the great ideological myth of entropy, in which the historic collapse of the British Empire is projected outwards into some immense cosmic declaration of the universe itself as well as of its molecular building blocks” [4, p. 269]. From his earliest essays on science fiction, however, Jameson also elevates the possibility for the genre to be productive in a Marxist sense. In “Generic Discontinuity in Brian Aldiss’ Starship”, he discusses “one of the supreme functions of SF as a genre, namely the ‘estrangement’, in the Brechtian sense, of our culture and institutions—a shocked renewal of our vision such that once again, and as though for the first time, we are able to perceive their historicity and their arbitrariness, their profound dependency on the accidents of man’s historical adventure” [4, p. 255]. The political component that science fiction acquires in these passages and others—the potential to conceptualise and express the historical situation of late capitalism—is substantially at odds with the limited set of possibilities that Jameson attributes to cultural material in his later discussions of postmodernity. This initial spate of work on science fiction would conclude somewhat with the publication of “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?” (1982). The essay is an early portrayal of the difficulties that cultural material faces when representing the past. Jameson extrapolates from Lukács’ work in The Historical Novel (1937), in order to discuss contemporary texts: “What is original about Lukács’s book is not merely [a] sense of the historical meaning of the emergence of this new genre, but also … the profound historicity of the genre itself, its increasing incapacity to register its content, the way in which, with Flaubert’s Salammbô … it becomes emptied of its vitality and survives as a dead form” [4, p. 285]. Jameson then interprets a primary example of the nostalgia

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film, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), in a similar manner. For Jameson, “Flaubert’s Carthage and Kubrick’s eighteenth century, but also the industrial turn of the century or the nostalgic 1930s or 1950s of the American experience, find themselves emptied of their necessity, and reduced to pretexts for so many glossy images” [4, p. 285]. Jameson aligns the emergence of Jules Verne with “the moment in which the historical novel as a genre ceases to be functional”, and discusses the social function of imagined futures [4, p. 285]. Through this work, Jameson argues, “the most characteristic SF does not seriously attempt to imagine the ‘real’ future of our social system. Rather, its multiple mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come” [4, p. 288]. In this manner, Jameson considers how representations of the future invoke a wider sense of the historical, rather than predominantly operating as a commentary on capitalism’s present-day structures. Congruent with Alexander Dunst’s narrative of historical possibility within Jameson’s work of the last three decades, the publication of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism signifies the beginning of a reduced and limited engagement with genre fiction for Jameson. Dunst frames the negativity of Jameson’s postmodern period “against a background of conservative reaction under Ronald Reagan in the United States” [22, p. 108]. In the fifteen years following Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson would produce only four essays on science fiction and another singular article on Raymond Chandler. In the essays, Jameson notably marginalises notions of the utopian—despite the progression of ideas suggested by “Progress or Utopia”. For example, in “Science Fiction as a Spatial Genre—Generic Discontinuities and the Problem of Figuration in Vonda McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting ” (1987), Jameson claims that the “shallowness” found in contemporary utopias “is not a mark of their failure of imagination, but rather very precisely their political function on the formal level— namely, to bring the reader up short against the atrophy of the utopian imagination and of the political vision in our own society” [4, p. 308]. While Jameson’s basic notions surrounding utopian fiction and desire do not alter dramatically here, they express a more limited sense of potential. Intriguingly, in two of these articles—“Science-Fiction as a Spatial Genre” and “The Space of Science Fiction: Narrative in A. E. Van Vogt” (1989)—he also discusses science fiction’s relationship to notions

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of space. Elsewhere he claims that, in postmodernity, “it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism” [2, p. 16]. In these two essays on science fiction, however, Jameson is less concerned with notions of postmodernity, but rather science fiction’s relationship to other genres—such as realism, detective fiction or contemporary soap operas. For example, in “Science Fiction as a Spatial Genre” he states: There is … in my mind some question as to whether the SF novelist can plan architectonic effects … in the way a conventional novelist—for example, the Flaubert of Salammbô—can, building carefully to an experience of proportion and time carefully blocked out by number of pages, by overexposure to sensory detail, and above all relying on a certain set of univocal reading directions which seem to me inconsistent and even incompatible with the play of generic discontinuities in SF. [4, p. 301]

When Jameson does consider the postmodern in this work, he diminishes the importance of postmodern development to certain kinds of space, particularly the room. In “The Space of Science Fiction”, he claims: “In all the extraordinary wealth of architectural and formal innovation in what is sometimes called postmodernism today, there is one basic form which does not seem to have changed … no one has been able to invent a new … form for what we will call the room. It is as though the room … had persisted with very little modification from prehistoric times” [320– 321]. Throughout this period, Jameson works to limit science fiction’s engagement with the postmodern. Despite reducing the genre’s ability to represent productive notions of utopia, he does not depict post-war science fiction in the same restrictive terms as other postmodern cultural material. Within this period, Jameson also published “The Synoptic Chandler” (1993). The essay again focuses on Chandler’s most famous detective novels. In a similar manner to his contemporaneous work on science fiction, Jameson limits the mapping capabilities of the detective in this piece. He returns to notions of the room, in a discussion of the importance of the office to Chandler’s novels, claiming: “I am tempted to say that in Chandler the office is—if not a well-nigh ontological category— then at least one that subsumes a much wider variety of social activity than it is normally understood to do” [23, p. 39]. Through a discussion

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of varying spaces in Chandler, Jameson claims that notions of the office “problematize the commonsensical or ‘natural’ conception of dwelling as such in Chandler; one of its advantages is the way it allows us … to transform our first sub-form—the ‘dwellings’ of the rich … into spaces of retreat and withdrawal that are somehow more analogous to offices than to houses or even quarters or apartments” [23, p. 41]. The discussion then moves onto the nature of Chandler’s strategies of containment. For Jameson, “there can be no question that this particular ‘map’ of the social totality is a complete and closed semiotic system: unified by the category of the ‘office’, its various positions and inversions are able in a satisfactory … manner to span the breadth of the social system from wealth to poverty and … from public to private” [23, pp. 44–45]. Curiously, in a fashion that rarely occurs across Jameson’s work, this discussion seldom seeks to discuss how historical contexts influence these matters of form. In the essay’s introduction, Jameson claims that the limits and repetitions of Chandler’s fiction are not a result of his lack of imagination, “rather that it was his society that lacked imagination and that such undoubted limits are those of the narrativity of Chandler’s socio-historical raw material” [23, p. 34]. The portrayal of Chandler’s novels that follows only concentrates on the limits of their mapping operations, however, and Jameson restricts their overall capabilities. He depicts the formal strategies of the text as a “cognitive map of Los Angeles that Marlow can be seen to canvas, pushing the doorbells of so many social types, from the great mansions to the junk filled rooms on Bunker Hill or West 54th Place” [23, p. 53]. In contrast with “On Raymond Chandler”, the essay does not argue for the political importance of this operation. With the publication of Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Jameson returned to working on genre fiction in earnest, and his discussions once again align with his earlier material. We can read his interest in science fiction, along with the way in which he allows it to function conceptually, within the narrative of fluctuating optimism that Dunst denotes when he frames “Jameson’s late work as the cautious opening of the present to the past and the future” [22, p. 117]. In this regard, the lack of material on science fiction during the 1980s and 1990s fits in with his pessimism surrounding notions of political engagement at the time. In Archaeologies of the Future, however, two decades after Jameson’s first work on the postmodern, science fiction is once again adept at theoretical engagement and political imagination. In the text’s second section, he republishes many of his early science fiction essays. The opening section,

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however, is comprised of new material that builds on his earlier questions of utopian imagination in relation to the science fiction form. In an early chapter, he discusses Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), noting the text’s several strategies of containment: “In Utopia … the mark of … absolute totalization is the geopolitical secession of the Utopian space itself from the world of empirical or historical reality: the great trench which King Utopus causes to be dug in order to ‘delink’ from the world” [4, p. 39]. Jameson continues this work across the new material in Archaeologies of the Future, where he denotes the strategies through which utopian fiction must imagine a radical break in order to represent an alternative future. He outlines the difficulty for the late capitalist subject to conceive of a society outside of the current situation, but also the manner in which the representation of a radical break enables a new awareness of history and the potential for dialectical thought. For Jameson, “the Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would look like after the break” [4, p. 232]. Throughout these discussions of generic fiction, Jameson delineates formal boundaries that privilege specific examples of science fiction. In certain ways, the preference for science fiction over high-postmodern literature appears to work against his highbrow interests elsewhere. In “The Space of Science Fiction”, he claims: I am very anxious that the texts I am going to be dealing with not be simply assimilated to the paradigms of high culture.… They cannot be read as Literature: not merely because they include much that is trash … but above all, because their strongest effects are distinct from those of high literature, are specific to the genre, and finally are enabled only by precisely those sub-literary conventions of the genre which are unassimilable to high culture. [4, p. 316]

His construction of the science fiction genre, however, once again inscribes a sense of hierarchies within this generic field, ones invested in the potential for Marxist analysis. For example, in a chapter of Archaeologies of the Future entitled “The Great Schism”, he delineates theoretical differences that separate fantasy and science fiction, in a manner that

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moves beyond their basic generic conventions. He begins the discussion by stating that the debate surrounding science fiction and fantasy “has seemed to take on overtones of that bitter opposition between high and mass culture crucial to the self-definition of high modernism but far less significant in its postmodern avatar” [4, p. 57]. This claim repeats his frequent appeal to move beyond “ethical” or value-based criticism. Nevertheless, Jameson’s eventual elevation of science fiction above fantasy continues to blend personal preference and Marxist ideology, in a manner similar to his discussion of postmodern literature. For example, he criticises the anti-historicist nature of the fantasy genre, particularly its nostalgic return to battles of good versus evil: The antagonistic religious ideologies of the Middle Ages are … combined into a contemporary anti-Enlightenment spiritualism which speaks across the spectrum to those dissatisfied with modernity.… It is also worth mentioning the ahistorical nature of these ethical preoccupations, inasmuch as it would seem to be the absence of any sense of history that most sharply differentiates fantasy from Science Fiction. [4, p. 61]

Phillip E. Wegner has claimed that “The discussion of fantasy offered in chapter 5 … is meant as much to highlight the shared aspects between the two practices as to mark their formal differences.… Indeed, fantasy is now to be understood as the practice that renders most evident the deepest drive of all science fiction, that “of forming and satisfying the Utopian wish” [24, p. 189]. Indeed, Jameson does attribute a utopian impulse to varying aspects of contemporary postmodern production (Valences of the Dialectic’s chapter on Wal-Mart is a particularly striking example). Nevertheless, it remains that he affords science fiction a number of conceptual abilities, ones not found in his discussions of other post-war cultural forms. Within the same chapter of Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson further differentiates certain types of science fiction from one other. In a discussion of the contemporary domination of fantasy over science fiction in terms of mainstream popularity, he makes the subtle distinction between the conceptually engaged work of Arthur C. Clarke, Dick, Le Guin, or Lem, and other types of science fiction. For example, Jameson states, “not only do the sales of fantasy lists far outweigh those of a diminished ‘serious’ SF, but the latter now has a specialized following that can

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scarcely be compared to the readership developed by Tolkien (posthumously) or Harry Potter (very actual indeed)” [4, p. 57]. The quotation marks denote another type of “non-serious” science fiction that Jameson leaves undefined—although the space-opera genre is perhaps implied. He further discusses the unsolved generic problems inherent in distinguishing fantasy from SF, and in particular in determining why any number of fantastic SF technologies, such as teleportation or time travel … should be regarded any differently from magicians and dragons. Darko Suvin’s influential conception of SF as “cognitive estrangement,” which emphasizes the commitment of the text to scientific reason, would seem to continue a long tradition of critical emphasis on verisimilitude from Aristotle on. [4, p. 63]

While Jameson neglects to name particular examples of “non-serious” science fiction, we might assume these texts contain a similar lack of the social to that of fantasy, and that their generic traits are easily interchangeable. For example, he claims that novels such as Frank Herbert’s Dune provide a developed sense of economics, and “reinforce components of an essentially historical situation, rather than serving as vehicles for the fantasies of power” [4, p. 59]. In contrast, Jameson claims that fantasy breaks any sense of the economic or of class structure into a system of “castes”, whereby each social group has its own differentiated, autonomous culture that has little to do with the class systems in our own world. Crucially, he distinguishes Le Guin’s fantasy novels from other examples of the genre, whereby in works such as Always Coming Home, “the paradigm of the struggle between Good and Evil becomes socialized and historicized by way of feminism” [4, p. 67]. Despite claiming that Jameson’s engagement with fantasy does not “devalue” the genre, Wegner cites from this same passage within Archaeologies of the Future, including the following statement: “Magic [in Le Guin] may be read, not as some facile plot device (which it no doubt becomes in the great bulk of mediocre fantasy production) but rather as a figure for the enlargement of human powers and their passage to the limit” [4, p. 66].2 In the text, Jameson goes on to claim that, through her interest in feminism and the social, Le Guin “triumphantly demonstrates that fantasy can also have critical and even demystificatory power” [4, p. 67]. In this manner, fantasy acquires the heightened position of other generic fictions. It does

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so, however, through the privileged example of Le Guin—an author who elsewhere writes “serious” and utopian science fiction. Importantly, the grouping of “serious” science fiction writers, of which Le Guin belongs to, do not ascend to the high-literary pretensions of contemporary figures such as DeLillo or David Foster Wallace. These writers commonly borrow from science fiction, however, a situation that Jameson notes on occasion, but does not articulate in any sustained sense. We can glimpse the critic’s complicated relationship to this sort of generic boundary in a reading of the character Cayce Pollard from William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Pollard works as a trend researcher and, for Jameson, has “racked up some impressive achievements, of which my favorite, reeking somewhat of DeLillo, is the identification of the first person in the world to wear his baseball cap backwards” [4, p. 390]. The disjunction between the subjective “my favorite” and the more negative “reeking”—coupled with Jameson’s ambivalent attitude towards DeLillo—denotes a continuing ambiguity in Jameson’s work surrounding the interaction between high literature and generic forms. We can further determine his position in his summary attention to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Jameson briefly mentions the text in parentheses in Postmodernism: “[The novel] has, for example, been assessed as the first feminist dystopia and thereby the end of the very rich feminist work in the Utopian genre as such” [2, p. 160]. In Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson makes no mention of this novel, or Atwood at all for that matter, and it is tempting to see this exclusion in terms of the text’s “literary” qualities. In the years after the publication of Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson would make this type of discrimination more obvious, in his review of Atwood’s later novel The Year of the Flood: For the most part, dystopia has been a vehicle for political statements of some kind: sermons against overpopulation, big corporations, totalitarianism.… Not coincidentally, it has also been the one science-fictional sub-genre in which more purely “literary” writers have felt free to indulge: Huxley, Orwell, even the Margaret Atwood of The Handmaid’s Tale. And not unpredictably, the results of these efforts have been as amateurish as analogous experiments in the realm of the detective or crime story (from Dostoevsky to Nabokov, if you like).… So-called mass cultural genres, in other words, have rules and standards as rigorous and professional as the more noble forms. But Atwood can now be considered to be a science-fiction writer, I’m happy to say, and this is not meant to disparage. [25]

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In this manner, Jameson briefly notes the tendency for contemporary literary novels to integrate science fiction elements, although he has not provided a sustained consideration of the limitations of this kind of operation. Wallace’s Infinite Jest or DeLillo’s Cosmopolis are set in future worlds, whether implicitly or explicitly. In contrast to the science fiction Jameson prefers, however, the high-literary novels depict a future situation only slightly more technologically advanced than our own. Postmodern hyperreality also appears as only marginally more dystopian in these texts. Jameson’s articles on postmodernism often perform a similar operation, whereby the depictions of the postmodern sublime, the waning of affect and the dissolution of boundaries between low and high art are exaggerated descriptions of contemporary situations. In many ways, we can align these essays with the work of DeLillo or Wallace. They derive much of their energy from illustrating the more delirious aspects of the postmodern condition, but also remain wary of these historical developments. These figures imagine the tendencies of postmodernity only exacerbating, with little possibility for change. Through these generic delineations, Jameson attributes to particular types of science fiction the ability to represent history in a more satisfactory manner. This propensity becomes more complex, however, in certain chapters of Archaeologies of the Future. Occasionally, Jameson moves beyond discussions of utopia and history, and sees certain science fiction novels as formal exercises, ones that provide models for serious theoretical exploration. For example, he sees Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris as a “metaphysical parable of the epistemological relation of the human race to its not-I in general: where that not-I is not merely nature, but another living being” [4, pp. 108–109]. Jameson uses a variety of science fiction texts that are not explicitly utopian to discuss other ideas in Archaeologies. In one instance, Blade Runner (1982) becomes a meditation “on the ‘android cogito’, which is to say on the gap or flaw in the self as such” [4, p. 141]. Jameson’s discussion of Solaris goes beyond this, however, to suggest that the novel says something essential about our current relationship to the other and its possibilities. The moment, once again, sees Jameson’s theory diminish the importance of identity politics and the subaltern. Despite his claim to consider the not-I in terms of a living being, rather than an unknowable sense of nature, his engagement with the other relies on notions of the Lacanian real, and thus remains a concept predominantly outside of certain cultural understandings. Jameson does not acknowledge another, more prevalent usage of the

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term found in postcolonial studies. Instead, the faulty way in which characters in Solaris (along with readers of the novel) try to use human logic and reason to interpret a sentient being’s action is, for Jameson, a strong rendering of the problem of the alien and limits of human knowledge: Lem’s ultimate message here [is] namely that in imagining ourselves to be attempting contact with the radically Other, we are in reality merely looking in a mirror and “searching for an ideal image of our own world.” This is why there is a way in which the operation is not merely self-defeating but even suicidal, for in order to strip away the anthropomorphism, we must somehow do away with ourselves. [4, p. 111]

Jameson sees other works, such as Alien, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Roadside Picnic, as offering similar considerations of varying problems of unknowability. In this manner, he presents the hypothetical scenarios and outcomes of science fiction as something like critical investigations, without reminding the reader that the novels build these narratives from certain formal conceits. At the same time, Jameson is unable to strategise any further from this point. Despite his renewed sense of optimism, he must close his argument by admitting that this work is “a rattling of the bars and an intense spiritual concentration and preparation for another stage that has not yet arrived” [4, p. 233]. As the new material in Archaeologies of the Future reaches its conclusion, it seems as if Jameson’s work on science fiction has traced its own limitations. The notion of utopia provides an avenue for Jameson to discuss the potential for historical change in a period where it seems largely impossible. Despite his “cautious opening of the present to the past and the future” in this material, he only arrives at a series of impasses. Notwithstanding the careful work he performs to articulate the conceptual valences of science fiction—above postmodern literature in particular—and the edges of utopian desire, he is unable to bridge certain gaps. The relationship between the high-literary postmodern novel and science fiction in Jameson thus becomes an extreme demonstration of how textual preferences encroach on his theoretical frameworks. While his readings of science fiction articulate a component of late capitalist experience, and potentially allow for a broadened view of history and our contemporary situation, these discussions circle a similar set of perceptual limitations to the ones he attributes to Doctorow and others. This might not be a problem of Jameson’s theoretical strategies, however, but of

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historical perspective. In the years following Archaeologies of the Future, his work has begun to discuss utopia in a different manner, and while the concept remains important to his work, it no longer dominates his portrayals of the future. For example, in texts such as The Antinomies of Realism and The Ancients and the Postmoderns , Jameson has further incorporated notions of collectivity and the global into his interpretive practice. At the same time, this more recent work hints at the further dissolution of specific genres. While he has often noted the breakdown of borders between high and low literatures, his classificatory operations have commonly worked to reinstate these kinds of boundaries. In the last decade, however, this tendency has diminished. As Jameson claims in his review of The Year of the Flood, “in any case it might be argued (but not here) that at this moment of time, all fiction approaches science fiction, as the future, the various futures, begin to dissolve into ever more porous actuality: and the end of the world seems to approach more rapidly than the unified world market itself” [25]. It would seem that the trend has continued to emerge in recent years, and presents itself as a dominant component of his newer theoretical discussions. In this manner, Jameson’s work has begun to envision the future through a different approach.

Jameson and Contemporary Cultural Material: Textual Peripheries, Cognitive Maps and the Collective In the final chapter of The Antinomies of Realism, entitled “The Historical Novel Today, or, Is It Still Possible”, Jameson begins his discussion by differentiating a number of recent, popular kinds of historical fiction. He claims, “the historical novel seems doomed to make arbitrary selections from the great menu of the past, so many differing and colorful segments or periods catering to historicist taste.… In short we have to do here, as with realism, with an impossible form or genre that … is still assiduously practiced” [5, p. 260]. Throughout the opening sections of the essay, Jameson enumerates the difficulties of representing the past and charts the historical novel’s formal modifications, considering Sir Walter Scott, Balzac, Tolstoy and Joyce’s Ulysses . In this regard, the chapter discusses many of Jameson’s recurring ideas and literary figures. His analysis of the historical novel will take a different turn, however, when he focuses

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on the present, and on texts that are not traditional historical novels— particularly David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010). Through this process, Jameson begins to dissolve many of the generic boundaries that have marked his earlier discussions. He sees Inception as science fiction, with no qualifiers that remove it from the novel form as such: “As so often in SF (in Necromancer, for example) the plot is borrowed from another genre, in this case the heist or caper film” [5, p. 299].3 In this manner, Jameson’s earlier sense that high literature borrows from—or attempts to assimilate—generic fiction has become a standard operation of the science fiction form. At the same time, he wishes to read the film “less as a text than as a model and a kind of thought experiment” [5, p. 298]. For Jameson, Inception uses the postmodern perpetual present as a formal device and a significant element of the film’s plot. The manner in which the film depicts dream worlds as objective and material realities “advances cinema itself to the degree to which it absolutely repudiates the … older [cinematic] conventions of subjectivity. These are neither dream-sequences of the traditional kind, nor hallucinations, nor even flash-backs” [5, p. 299]. Jameson then claims, “the contemporaneity of Inception (its postmodernity rather than its postmodernism) is to be found in this aesthetic of an absolute present” [5, p. 300]. The film’s levels of dreams within dreams—each operating on an exponentially slower temporal level than the last—become a representation of this postmodern situation. The elevator that the film’s protagonist uses to move between differing moments of his past provides Jameson with a model for the contemporary historical novel—one that considers the past, present and future simultaneously, and offers strategies for considering historical collectivity. This model is replicated, for Jameson, in the formal invention of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas . For Jameson, this novel is highly postmodern in its use of several discursive strategies and its formal invention. As he notes, however, the novel practices “an aesthetic of singularity, in which what is constructed is not meant to be the elaboration of a style or the practice of a genre … but rather the experimental projection of a single one-time conceit inimitable and without a legacy or any intention of founding a tradition formal or otherwise: not a new style, but the assemblage of various styles” [5, p. 304]. Throughout the chapter, Jameson enumerates the multiple ways in which Cloud Atlas invokes larger notions of history. The text moves through a number of historical periods, including two futures— firstly a technological dystopia, followed by a post-apocalyptic world. The

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novel also depicts a series of communicative technologies, providing a history of language and discourse in the process. Jameson discusses the dialectical relationship of freedom and emancipation that shapes the text’s form, as the first half of the book traces a “history of imprisonments: the enslavement of the Moriori, the confinement of Ewing to his exiguous cabin, the penniless destitution of the young composer, the surveillance of the atomic energy site”, and others [5, p. 311]. The novel’s second half, however, resolves these situations and, for Jameson, the “glissando through all the styles and affects of history, whose unremitting greed it handles with comic precision, leaves behind it the taste of that immemorial cruelty which is human history itself and which Hegel could only think of as one endless slaughterhouse. The joyousness of this art … is scarcely contradicted by our other sense of prolonged horror” [5, p. 312]. For Jameson, the various discursive strategies, historical perspectives and portrayals of social formation serve as a reminder of the heterogeneity of human impulses, and here he makes a larger claim about the purpose of art in our current historical situation: The aestheticians return again and again to the problem of the extra-artistic and referential dimensions of art, in its shabby ideological messages and its altogether insufficient and rather pitiful calls to this or that action, this or that indignation or “call to arms” … this or that coming to consciousness. But the moment of the aesthetic is not that call but rather its reminder that all those impulses exist: the revolutionary Utopian, one full as much as the immense disgust with human evil, Brecht’s “temptation of the good,” the will to escape and to be free, the delight in craftsmanship and production, the implacably satiric, unremittingly skeptical gaze. Art has no function but to reawaken all these differences at once in an ephemeral instant; and the historical novel no function save to resurrect for one more brief moment their multitudinous coexistence in History itself. [5, pp. 312–313]

In this manner, Jameson finds a text that provides the cognitive mapping operation that he describes in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, as well as the interpretation of Marx that he foregrounds in the same essay, whereby “Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think [of capitalism] positively and negatively all at once” [2, p. 47]. While Jameson’s more pessimistic depictions of postmodernity often refrained from emphasising the positive aspects of late capitalism, this reading of Cloud Atlas provides a potent example of a wider view of history. At the same time, in seeing the positive and negative aspects of

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historical development, he perhaps moves beyond criticisms of nostalgia and offers the potential to discuss a contemporary sense of modes of production in a more dialectical fashion. Jameson similarly expands his sense of cognitive mapping in another example of more recent cultural material. His article “Realism and Utopia in The Wire”—published five years after Archaeologies and reprinted in The Ancients and the Postmoderns (2015)—comprises elements of his theory relating to realism, film, television, detective fiction, cognitive mapping and Utopian thought. Once again, Jameson works to dissolve the literary and cinematic or televisual, when he asks, “Is The Wire a police procedural … ? No doubt, but it is also a version of the organized crime story.… There is a political drama going on here as well, but its nature as local politics reminds us that it is also very much a local series.… The broadest categories would then be that of the thriller or that of the action film” [26, p. 239]. Jameson then goes on to conflate the series with the classical epic and the Dickensian serial. Despite these generic discontinuities, The Wire provides several important cognitive mapping operations. We can relate these qualities of the text to the capacities that Jameson attributes to realist and detective novels. Nevertheless, this delineation of generic boundaries and formal capabilities seems finally to disappear in this material. Up until recently, Jameson has warily differentiated the science fiction novel from high-postmodern literature, despite their various relationships. In the years following Archaeologies of the Future, however, these boundaries become of less importance. These texts are not decisively high literature, in the manner that the novels of Pynchon or David Foster Wallace predominantly are. Cloud Atlas and The Wire incorporate basic generic components with certain middlebrow notions of “prestige”, but function predominantly as composites. In his newer essays, Jameson’s classificatory operations remain as guidelines for discussing the texts, but do not serve to restrict their abilities in the same manner. Additionally, just as the borders between cultural forms and genres are beginning to dissolve in Jameson’s work, the possibilities for future utopian desire and for conceiving new kinds of subjectivity and collectivity are also becoming apparent. Jameson sees the police procedural as charting a series of institutions, both legal and illegal, in a way that places an importance on the ongoing web of connections, slowly pieced together by the show’s detectives:

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The uniform cops simply know the neighborhoods and the corners on which the drugs are finally sold to customers by teams of juveniles.… But this is as it were simply the appearance of the reality … whose ultimate structure (source, refinement, transportation, sales network, and bulk or wholesale distribution) must remain too abstract for any single observer to experience, although it may be known and studied. [26, p. 242]

In this manner, Jameson’s reading of The Wire closely aligns with his discussions of Chandler. The presence of utopian desire within the text, however, builds on the detective novel’s political importance. The show persistently represents the beginnings and failings of a variety of utopian projects, whereby individuals attempt to restructure particular components of the society that the series depicts. For Jameson, the case of the dockworker Frank Sobotka, who attempts to reinvigorate Baltimore’s port, “adds something to The Wire that cannot be found in most other mass-cultural narratives: a plot in which utopian elements are introduced, without fantasy of wish fulfillment, into the construction of the fictive, yet utterly realistic events” [26, p. 253]. For Jameson, “the future and future history have broken open both high and mass-cultural narratives in the form of dystopian science fiction and future catastrophe. But in The Wire, exceptionally, it is the utopian future which here and there breaks through, before reality and the present again close it down” [26, p. 254]. This is one of the few moments in Jameson’s career where he reads the utopian as present in the text, outside of science fiction. Both of these aspects of The Wire, the cognitive map and the utopian impulse, hint at another recurring aspect of Jameson’s discussions of the future, that of the collective. Jameson sees Sobotka’s project as “not an individual reform but rather a collective and historical reversal” [26, p. 253]. Elsewhere, the criminal network represents “a whole milieu, the world of a whole society or subsociety … but the ‘detective’ is also a group” [26, p. 243]. In his earlier work on cognitive mapping, he has seen new forms of collectivity as not yet existing, but waiting to be theorised in further detail. As discussed in my chapter on realism, in “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?” Jameson discusses a “fourth moment of theory” one not yet existing at the time of the essay’s publication in 2004. In the essay he delineates this tendency in more depth, stating:

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One wants to think of formulations (and indeed diagrams) for collectivities that are at least as complex and stimulating as those of Lacan for the individual unconscious. These structures have certainly been glimpsed in the various explorations of the social or collective Imaginary in recent years.… Subaltern studies … offers a variety of new ways to map a whole range of collective phenomena. But it is in the nature of the beast (the human animal) to drawback from such openings … and new theoretical fashions like Giorgio Agamben’s idea of naked life are at once read as metaphysical or existential statements or at worst enlisted to prove—being a kind of zero degree—that the collective does not exist. [27, pp. 406–407]

Jameson also claims “it is not very satisfying to discuss fields that don’t (yet) exist”; nevertheless, the term has also begun to proliferate in his later work, offering a number of ways in which we might approach future notions of the concept [27, p. 407]. In The Ancients and the Postmoderns in particular, he makes several references to differing notions of the collective. Importantly, these discussions often arise in readings of particular cultural forms: for example, the films of Robert Altman and recent literary production. In his essay on Robert Altman, Jameson discusses the representation of collective environments, but also the collaborative and collective nature of the creative process of film. Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) provides a differing example of the mapping procedure in The Wire. Jameson accentuates the fact that the film is adapted from a selection of Raymond Carver’s short stories, but notes the extent to which Altman “betrays” Carver. Within this discussion, Jameson sees the film’s dissolution of generic boundaries as aiding in the mapping operation: “A genre has rules which must somehow be creatively navigated, and it is a historical formation which has its social preconditions. This is at least the perspective in which I want to go on examining Short Cuts , as the emergence of totality from the short story” [26, p. 214]. For Jameson: each character is a bundle of … distinct narratives, and not some unified identity.… It is a view consistent with the kind of contemporary thought that evokes “multiple subject positions” and repudiates notions of the centered self; and it makes … Altman’s representation of the city … different from those earlier works which presented the latter as a combination of coincidences that finally resolve themselves into a unified picture.…

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The distinction is subtle but significant … and the new genre that instantiates it expresses a new historical experience of population … of the multitude … of the phenomenonology of globalization.… This is more than a casual experience of something unique and hitherto unencountered: it amounts to an expansion of subjectivity itself and perhaps at the limit a modification of its structure. We may indeed speak here of collectivity. [26, pp. 217–218]

Here, one of Jameson’s characteristic detours represents an ellipsis in his discussion. The collaborative nature of cinematic production offers another kind of collectivity for Jameson to consider momentarily, before he returns to a discussion of the function of the “roundabouts” of connectivity to Short Cuts ’ narrative form. While he will further discuss a notion of collectivity as “American misery”, these wider notions of genre, the global and the collective remain only suggestive concepts in his more recent work. At the same time, these developments in Jameson’s theory have begun to acquire several affinities with certain areas of postcolonial study— ones concentrating on various notions of the cosmopolitan and peripheral realisms in particular. As with the relationship between Jameson and affect theory, however, the continuing distance between these scholars— seemingly a prolongation of the fallout following the Jameson-Ahmad debate—obscures the potential for productive engagement. For example, a lineage of scholars considering the cosmopolitan has maintained a cursory relationship with Jameson’s larger contributions to critical theory over the last two decades. For theorists of the cosmopolitan working in the late 1990s, Jameson’s material on the postmodern is occasionally aligned with an idealism surrounding certain theories of globalism or “postnationalism”, which is often contrasted with the continuing and very material struggles of the developing world. In his introduction to Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Pheng Cheah claims that postnational theory is derived from “the modes of production narrative that Fredric Jameson borrowed from Ernest Mandel” [28, p. 32]. Cheah sees the postnational turn as arguing that “the deterritorialization of space in transnational … late capitalism erodes the naturalized borders of the nation, pointing to its imminent demise” [28, p. 32]. Here, Cheah aligns himself with Michael Mann’s claim that “capitalist profit making has resulted in not quite Fredric Jameson’s ‘postmodern hyperspace’” [29, p. 138]. Cheah is quick to remind the reader “even as the

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historic role of the nation-state as a framework for economic management is eroded in the new phase of globalization, existing forms of social and political power remain based in national realities” [28, pp. 34–35]. At a certain level, Jameson’s sense of “hyperspace” has little to do with the persistence of colonial discrepancies in wealth, power and cultural visibility in the material world outside of the West. This reading, however, excises significant elements of Jameson’s work on postmodernism: notions such as “hyperspace” describe problematic aspects of Western cultural material and of subjectivity in this material. They also constitute part of what is a largely negative depiction of multinational capitalism, particularly when compared to the postnationalists whom Cheah references. In this manner, Jameson’s more well-known phrases from his work on postmodernism—such as “hyperspace”, “the waning of affect” or “the hysterical sublime”—are commonly divorced from his Marxist readings of the global. Work on cosmopolitanism by critics such as Tom Lutz, Berthold Schoene and Robert Spencer continues in this vein. While these scholars reference Jameson’s numerous contributions to contemporary theory as a matter of course, rarely do they consider his work at length. For example, Lutz momentarily invokes Jameson when claiming that “instead of falling for what Fredric Jameson called ‘the false problem of value’, critics are now required either to disavow evaluative literary judgments or to cop to their own place of elite privilege, their own exclusionary biases” [30, p. 2]. Lutz moves on “to talk not just about regionalist fiction but about what literature, the old-fashioned Literature with a capital ‘L’, has to offer and has been offering for the last century and a half”, leaving Jameson’s own complicated engagement with these issues unexplored [30, p. 3]. Spencer, meanwhile, considers Jameson’s discussion of cosmopolitanism as a utopian project. Here, Spencer asserts that “Jameson’s calls for ‘the renewal of Utopian thinking’ … can be heeded by a postcolonial criticism prepared not just to demystify ideology … but also to amplify the ways in which literary texts help construct new, more reflexive forms of subjectivity in addition to more comprehensive forms of human community” [31, p. 55]. Despite the suggestiveness of Spencer’s claim, his engagement with Jameson here remains brief. As we can glimpse in this short passage, however, a more complimentary relationship between Jameson and more recent practices in postcolonial studies has begun to develop, even if it is only occasionally acknowledged. This is evident in both postcolonial works on the cosmopolitan as well as on “peripheral realisms”.

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Scholarly production on the peripheral is comparable to the work on cosmopolitanism discussed above, in that the two ambits are interested in texts that are able to witness both subaltern and international realities. In this material, critics have sought to describe larger global contexts for more localised narratives in a similar fashion. At the same time, the more contemporary literary critics can also be loosely grouped with a subset of the “new realist turn” that Jed Esty and Colleen Lye describe in the “Peripheral Realisms” special issue of Modern Language Quarterly, published in 2012. Esty and Lye discuss a particular strand of this turn that takes place predominantly in postcolonial studies: For the contributors devoted to recovering Georg Lukács’s theory of critical realism, Lukács is best appreciated for having located a text’s realism in its aspiration to totality, with “totality” defined not as something out there but as the demand to consider interrelations and interactions between disparate phenomena. (Thus for Lukács naturalism fails to be a critical— that is, a true—realism precisely insofar as it seeks a photographic record of immediate reality rather than a depiction of historical forces in motion or the dynamics of society.) [32, p. 277]

For Esty and Lye, the “Peripheral Realisms” issue is very much within this return to Lukács. Susan Z. Andrade and Sharae Deckard, amongst others, contribute in this fashion to the journal. This work has also mirrored certain aspects of Jameson’s project, particularly in the reading of certain contemporary novels as mapping operations. In this manner, Esty and Lye argue for “the possible advantage of peripherality for thinking relationally across different kinds of sub-ordinated positions on different scales” [32, p. 272]. Sharae Deckard, for example, seeks to see Roberto Bolaño’s depiction of Ciudad Juárez in 2666 as a cognitive mapping project of not just the Mexican border city, but also of wider global connections. For Deckard, the novel is an “insurgent attempt to reformulate the realist world novel in order to overcome the reification of earlier modes of realism.… The novel’s form is systemically world-historical, uniting a particular semiperiphery (Ciudad Juárez) and a particular historical conjuncture (late capitalism at the millennium) with a vast geopolitical scope” [33, p. 353]. Meanwhile, even as Lukács does not feature as a primary influence in the more explicitly cosmopolitan theory of Lutz and Schoene, we can see similar types of readings in their work, which often seeks to describe a larger global context for more

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localised narratives. For example, Schoene’s work on cosmopolitanism asserts contemporary Britain’s “unique cultural and political position as a post-imperial and increasingly devolved nation sandwiched between neoimperial US America and supranational ‘Old’ Europe. It is this in-between position … that defines contemporary Britain’s specific globality: as part of its imperial heritage, it is linked to over three quarters of the world” [34, pp. 6–7]. These emergent reading practices have worked to expand our sense of global interrelations, while making claims for the ability of particular literatures to describe greater human collectivity. A hesitance can be located here, however, between asserting larger theoretical frameworks and maintaining a notion of heterogeneity and dexterity. Work over the last decade that focuses on geocriticisms, literary cartographies and the spatial turn, as represented by scholars such as Bertrand Westphal and Robert T. Tally Jr., has emphasised the possibilities of criticism that sees literature as a mapping process. In comparison, cosmopolitan critics have often closely aligned with Bruce Robbins’ sense that they “participate in and comment on the term’s scaling down, its pluralizing and its particularizing” [35, p. 3]. Commonly their work remains suggestive rather than systematic. Schoene’s The Cosmopolitan Novel is representative of these tendencies, in that it constructs a case for Britain’s tactical advantages when reading the global situation, but also moves away from critical rigidity. In the text, Schoene claims, “there must never be a school of cosmopolitan novelists lest the genre lose its contagious momentum as both inspirational contact and process of inoperative dissemination” [34, pp. 123–124]. Tally Jr. has considered this tension in terms of the contributions of both Foucault and Jameson to these varying areas of study and claims: Maps are always and already bound up in those power/knowledge networks which are the subject of Foucault’s genealogical studies, but (as Foucault also insists) that does not mean that mapmaking is itself always and only a repressive practice. The inability to map one’s position relative to a geography and social totality, as Jameson suggests, is perhaps the emblematic form of modern or postmodern alienation. And though maps function to enforce boundaries, to monitor movements, to aid the police, to capture a given space, and so on, maps may also have liberatory uses. The map of the prison, for instance, may be of help to one who wishes to escape. [36, pp. 108–109]

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In these wider discussions, the restrictive formal containment that defines many of Jameson’s textual examples becomes crucial. For instance, while his essay on The Wire develops the notion of cognitive mapping beyond his hesitant early discussions, the focus remains predominantly on Western cultural material. In contrast to the work on peripheral realisms or the cosmopolitan, Jameson delineates his texts’ strategies of containment. In the case of The Wire, he states, “Baltimore is a complete world in itself; it is not a closed world but merely conveys the conviction that nothing exists outside it.… Where the Greek gets his drugs is absolutely not a matter of conjecture (or of subjective mapping)” [26, p. 250]. The lasting distance practiced by Jameson towards postcolonial or peripheral literature after the reception of his “Third-World Literature” essay makes itself apparent symptomatically: Jameson looks to cultural material that performs elaborate mapping operations, but remains restricted by its position within a North American context. At the same time, the attention he pays to the limits of his textual choices has its own value. Critics working on the peripheral or cosmopolitan have remained less interested in the formal containments of their chosen texts. Nevertheless, any larger figural representation of global capitalism would benefit from a consideration of the contours of these textual and perceptual boundaries. Similarly, peripheral or cosmopolitan literature may offer a more dexterous position from which to describe larger global connections, but the move towards more cohesive maps of global capitalism inevitably requires a larger theoretical framework. The notion of cognitive mapping that Jameson has tentatively discussed provides an overarching structure for divergent postcolonial reading practices, while providing more room for heterogeneity than earlier critics have suggested. For example, Jameson concludes The Ancients and the Postmoderns by claiming: There is one category [of literature] in which Americans have begun to flag, and that is Faulknerian maximalism, whose interminable voices no longer seem tolerable without their Southern framework. Now, translated into something called “magic realism,” this American specialty … has been promoted into a genuinely global genre, and we glimpse, outside the confines of an American Program Era, the outlines of some wholly different world system of letters coming into being. [26, p. 292]

While Jameson has often mentioned his interest in global literature, he has rarely discussed these kinds of texts in detail. Whether his future work

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will further integrate notions of cognitive mapping, global literatures and historical change remains to be seen. His later discussions of a variety of cultural materials offer a multiplicity of reading strategies that hint in this direction, however, even if certain incongruities will likely persist between postcolonial studies and Jameson’s position within the United States. At this stage, it would seem that even an antagonistic engagement between Jameson and these scholarly ambits would be highly productive, especially when compared to the prolonged distance currently in place.

Notes 1. The timing of this article’s production is of some significance here. Although the essay was first published in Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson assigns its production to the year 1982. As this date is right around the period where Jameson starts to use the term “postmodern” regularly, one wonders whether his notion of “modernist high literature” might include writers such as Pynchon in this instance, given his earlier senses of modernism. Note that Jameson does not use the term “high modernist literature”, but rather “modernist high literature”. 2. For Wegner’s citation of this passage, see [24, p. 196]. 3. Please note that the reference to Necromancer appears to be a typographical error, given that William Gibson’s Neuromancer borrows narrative elements from the heist genre.

References 1. Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. 2. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. 3. Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. 4. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. 5. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. 6. Jameson, Fredric. “On Raymond Chandler.” In The Critical Response to Raymond Chandler, edited by J. Kenneth Van Dover, 65–87. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. 7. Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory. London: Verso, 2008. 8. Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1990.

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9. Hungerford, Amy. “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary.” American Literary History 20, no. 1/2 (2008): 410–419. https://doi.org/ 10.1093/alh/ajm044. 10. Parrish, Timothy. “Tribal Politics and the Postmodern Product.” American Literary History 22, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 645–656. https://doi.org/10.1093/ alh/ajq036. 11. Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. London: Verso, 1998. 12. Jameson, Fredric. “The Aesthetics of Singularity.” New Left Review, no. 92 (March/April 2015): 101–132. Accessed May 23, 2020. https://newleftre view.org/issues/II92/articles/fredric-jameson-the-aesthetics-of-singularity. 13. Shoop, Casey. “Thomas Pynchon, Postmodernism, and the Rise of the New Right in California.” Contemporary Literature 53, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 51– 86. https://doi.org/10.1353/cli.2012.0001. 14. Grausam, Daniel. “History, Community, Spirituality: Keywords for Rethinking Postmodernism?” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 398–411. https://doi.org/10.1353/cli.2010.0008. 15. Levine, Paul. E. L. Doctorow. London: Methuen, 1985. 16. Morris, Christopher D. Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow. Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 1991. 17. Parks, John G. E. L. Doctorow. New York: Continuum, 1991. 18. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. 19. Doctorow, E. L. The Book of Daniel. London: Macmillan, 1972. 20. McLaughlin, Robert L. “Post-Postmodern Discontent.” symploké 12, no. 1/2 (2004): 53–68. Accessed May 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 40550666. 21. Duda, John. Review of Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, by Fredric Jameson. MLN 120, no. 5 (December 2005): 1245–1249. Accessed May 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 3840711. 22. Dunst, Alexander. “Late Jameson, or, After the Eternity of the Present.” New Formations, no. 65 (Autumn 2008): 105–118. https://doi.org/10. 3898/newf.65.07.2008. 23. Jameson, Fredric. “The Synoptic Chandler.” In Shades of Noir: A Reader, edited by Joan Copjec, 33–56. London: Verso, 1993. 24. Wegner, Phillip E. Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, The University, and the Desire for Narrative. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. 25. Jameson, Fredric. “Then You Are Them.” Review of The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood. London Review of Books 31, no. 17 (September 10, 2009). Accessed May 23, 2020. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/ n17/fredric-jameson/then-you-are-them.

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26. Jameson, Fredric. The Ancients and The Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms. London: Verso, 2015. 27. Jameson, Fredric. “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?” Critical Enquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 403–408. https://doi.org/10.1086/ 421141. 28. Cheah, Pheng. “Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitical Today.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 20–44. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 29. Mann, Michael. “Nation-States in Europe and Other Continents: Diversifying, Developing, Not Dying.” Daedalus 122, no. 3 (1993): 115–140. Accessed May 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027185. 30. Lutz, Tom. Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. 31. Spencer, Robert. Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 32. Esty, Jed, and Colleen Lye. “Peripheral Realisms Now.” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 3 (September 2012): 269–288. https://doi.org/10. 1215/00267929-1631397. 33. Deckard, Sharae. “Peripheral Realism, Millennial Capitalism and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 1 (September 2012): 351–372. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-1631433. 34. Schoene, Berthold. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 35. Robbins, Bruce. “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 1–19. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 36. Tally Jr., Robert T. Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer. New York: Continuum, 2009.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: Fredric Jameson, the Novel and Contemporary Reading Practices

In order to describe Jameson’s literary engagement, my work has relied on retracing his development over the past half-century. In doing so, this book has constructed a multitude of narratives within that time frame. These narratives have often described fluctuations in Jameson’s theory: this applies to his interest in specific kinds of novels, his use of certain terminologies and his sense of optimism for the future. Frequently, the changing landscape of critical theory and literary studies has served as a backdrop to these modifications within Jameson’s work. While scholars have predominantly defined his career in terms of three major texts— Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism—the sheer volume of his output ensures his work is often contradictory, and more nuanced than critics sometimes acknowledge. Through examining his treatment of specific literary periods, the changing and evolving nature of his project is particularly evident. For example, over the course of his career, Jameson’s modernist interests have become increasingly restricted and highbrow. Conversely, his discussions of nineteenth-century texts have become more inclusive and varied. These processes unfold over the course of several decades, however, and several theoretical considerations have influenced their development. In this manner, Jameson’s sense of political possibility at certain moments of his career has seriously influenced the manner in which he has discussed certain texts and genres. Similarly, his ongoing reframing of late modernist criticism and Western Marxist debates surrounding modernism underpin much of his work on © The Author(s) 2020 J. Cogle, Jameson and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54824-7_5

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high modernism—although this aspect of his project rarely becomes his explicit focus. This more nuanced view of Jameson limits critics’ persistent claims that his theoretical frameworks erase difference or totalise in a problematic fashion. More recent interpretive practices have also commonly portrayed Jameson’s interpretive model as focused entirely on latent economic symptoms found in cultural forms. These engagements present Jameson’s texts as paradigmatic examples of specific critical practices, now frozen in time. Nevertheless, Jameson has continued to reframe the ideas found in these works. For instance, his notion of postmodernity has altered considerably since the publication of “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. While the essay remains widely taught and discussed, Jameson’s work has moved forward substantially. In the book length project of the same name, he republished the essay “without significant modifications, since the attention it received at the time (1984) lends it the additional interest of a historical document”, already signifying his distance from the work [1, p. xv]. Jameson continued to publish a wide range of material on postmodernity throughout the following decade and into the next century, and he regularly made subtle alterations to his earlier formulations. As Alexander Dunst notes: These new conceptualisations are never explicitly theorised or summarised, never expressed in a statement of the magnitude of the earlier writings. Rather, they are fragmentary and brief: single sentences and sub-clauses, shifts in emphasis and terminology. What these adjustments introduce are in most cases not outright reversals but integrations of the new and re-interpretations of the old. Nevertheless they significantly open Jameson’s critical project to heterogeneity, dynamic change and dialectical contradiction in ways often absent from his thinking in the 1980s. [2, p. 112]

In this regard, closely attending to the literary readings within Jameson’s body of work reveals this aspect of his career in obvious terms. For example, through mapping the progression of his work on science fiction and contemporary fiction, we are able to come to more nuanced understanding of his portrayal of postmodernity, one that develops across several decades, and one that moves beyond a problematic notion of a perpetual present.

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Furthermore, criticisms of Jameson’s work—whether of his interpretive models or of his problematic aspirations to totality—rarely acknowledge that his arguments are in a similar kind of flux throughout his texts. He tempers most of his prescriptive statements with carefully considered explications, clauses and deferrals. For example, he does not tell us to “Always historicize!” without adding an ironic exclamation mark, or without admitting that the imperative is indeed only a “slogan” in his next sentence. The paragraph that follows this famous statement is also a complicated discussion of the many possibilities of the “historicizing operation”. Quite obviously, this minute phrase is the first two words of a difficult and extremely self-reflexive text, but this has not dissuaded many critics from equating Jameson’s work with this singular declaration. His dialectical approach ensures his work is in perpetual motion—and often subtly ironic—but this is perhaps not so obvious in the more dour early work. These aspects of his writing are especially easy to remove when lifting brief quotes from his relentlessly detailed sentences and paragraphs. In considering his often evolving, sometimes contradictory approach to novels—rather than focusing heavily on the systematic nature of some of his thought and work—this facet of Jameson comes to the surface. As he mentions in the introduction to the updated edition of The Ideologies of Theory, which collects essays from over forty years of his career, “inasmuch as ideological analysis is so frequently associated with querulous and irritable negativism, it may be appropriate to stress the interest and delight all these topics, dilemmas and contradictions as well as jests and positions— still have for me” [3, p. xi]. His engagement with the literary accentuates this, where his frequent “jests” about certain authors and texts work against the more programmatic claims he makes elsewhere. His repeated discussions of Balzac’s tedious opening chapters, or his bemused engagements with Nabokov’s novels, accentuate this component of his writing. This aspect of Jameson’s material has increased, particularly in the last decade. In the opening paragraph of The Ancients and the Postmoderns (2015), for example, he claims, “I will myself begin (as one must) with an outrageous assertion, namely that modernity begins with the Council of Trent (ending in 1953)—in which case the Baroque becomes the first secular age” [4, p. 1]. In the passage that follows, Jameson will argue this notion in a more serious manner. The opening statement’s qualifying terms, however, reveal the extent to which he plays with historical narrative and with theoretical discourse, or the extent to which history remains a pliable material for Jameson.

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Criticism has often focused on these kinds of larger periodising operations, accusing Jameson of erasing difference in particular. As discussed across the book, this periodising operation is one that pays more attention to complexity than critics usually acknowledge. The models that Jameson borrows from both Raymond Williams and Ernest Mandel see history not as a series of discrete periods, but a far more contradictory and contested process of development. In many instances, nevertheless, critics portray Jameson’s periodising operations as totalising procedures, ones that erase difference and heterogeneity. As he notes in relation to his discussions of postmodernity, however: I must now briefly address [an] objection to periodization, a concern about its possible obliteration of heterogeneity, one most expressed by the Left…. I am very far from feeling that all cultural production today is “postmodern” in the broad sense I will be conferring on this term. The postmodern is, however, the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses—what Raymond Williams has usefully termed “residual” and “emergent” forms of cultural production—must make their way. If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into history as sheer heterogeneity … a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable. [1, p. 6]

This is especially evident in his readings of literature. For example, the cultural material of high modernity takes on several valences and continues to shift and fluctuate throughout his career. Through closely reading his hesitancies concerning high-modernist literature, this book has also demonstrated a more complex characteristic of Jameson’s periodising operations, and helped to delineate a period that Martin Donougho calls “the absent center of his work” [5, p. 81]. In regard to the nineteenth century, Jameson’s sense of mediation between realist texts and capitalist development has occasionally lacked the fluidity of the historical model he constructs in The Political Unconscious . Later work, however, has accentuated a more complex and developed notion of this period and its literature. In this regard, while Jameson’s more singular, totalising narrative concerns the inexorable spread of global capitalism across the last three centuries, the development remains contested in his readings of literary materials. For Jameson, realism attempts to properly map a rapidly splintering cultural, economic and geographical terrain—an operation that persists in certain literary examples through to the twentyfirst century. High modernism, meanwhile, attempts to deny or subvert

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this historical development, at the same time as providing a different kind of map, one that charts complex subjective experience. As Jameson has discussed: “in the late nineteenth century, writers became aware that the world of newly emergent capitalism was an unrepresentable totality which it was nonetheless their duty and vocation to represent. The great moderns—Mallarmé, Joyce, Musil et al.—achieved this impossible and double-binding imperative by representing their inability to represent” [6]. If these varying representational strategies remain contingent and largely without impact should perhaps not be a criticism of Jameson—as Terry Eagleton has claimed—but a testament to the decreasing possibility for cultural material to alter the current mode of production. Despite these challenges, Jameson’s work continues to search for new interpretive strategies. The combined notions of cognitive mapping and the collective, as well as a widening historical perspective, have lately provided a new vigour to his discussions of cultural forms, and offer new political possibilities for cultural material. While these new directions in Jameson’s work represent an intriguing renewal of his continuing preoccupations, his engagement with the novel also accentuates persistent problems in his construction of a variety of literary canons. This is especially evident in the genres and authors he continues not to discuss. In The Ancients and the Postmoderns , he claims that Marc McGurl’s work in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, which considers three strands of post-war fiction, “quickly translates back into a canon and questions of value; and at this point, quite apart from the absence of the poets, sets off all kinds of idiotic questions about inclusion, principally the one I have asked throughout: where is Faulkner?” [4, p. 291]. Jameson has elsewhere expressed a lack of interest in critics that question his textual omissions, even as he admits to asking a similar one of McGurl here.1 As he has discussed: “I am willing to identify in an imaginary way with any number of foreign ‘national literatures’ as come my way, but it is no doubt a fickle and transitory identification; I’m very unreliable, and also, owing to the language matter, fairly Eurocentric (but very much including Latin America)” [7, p. 1087]. While we cannot expect Jameson to discuss all texts, and has often provided reasons for his particular enthusiasms and absences, the visibility of his work ensures that these personal choices become canonising gestures. As he notes in the introduction to The Modernist Papers , his chosen “literary texts might also be taken to form some sort of personal canon, if not indeed a

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constellation of more universal validity” [8, p. ix]. While he consistently diminishes the importance of his literary choices, this claim gestures to its wider implications. For instance, his more prolific and sympathetic commentators often discuss the breadth of his knowledge and cultural engagement; they accentuate this component of his work amidst a more general understanding of his career and importance. In this regard, while Jameson’s frame of reference remains wide by most standards, we can certainly question the extent of his “inclusivity”. Scholars working in gender studies and postcolonial studies in particular have commonly criticised varying aspects of Jameson’s work. For example, Sianne Ngai accentuates the male tradition of paranoid or “conspiracy” theory, whereby “conspiracy theory seems intimately tied to the hermeneutic quests of male agent-intellectuals from Critical Inquiry to Fox Television” [9, p. 300]. For Ngai, Jameson reads conspiracy films in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, “as allegories for the attempt—and more significantly, failure—on the part of subjects to grasp global capitalism’s social totality in formal or representational terms” [9, p. 298]. This gendered critical operation could also be marked in other cultural terms: the examples Ngai raises in particular (of Jameson, Fox Mulder from The X -Files and the heroes of films such as The Conversation and All the President’s Men) are all thoroughly Western figures. These criticisms are accentuated when closely considering his literary interests, where female writers are persistently marginalised in his personal canon, and his interest in more peripheral literature remains only modestly discussed. Categories such as the domestic novel remain largely absent from his work, despite an interest in private space. Furthermore, Flaubert stands as his predominant example within discussions of domestic space and the role of women in nineteenth-century fiction. In this manner, Jameson has persistently avoided discussing personal politics of identity: notions of race are conspicuously absent in his engagements with the colonial, and he quickly folds any acknowledgements of feminism into wider notions of class. Here, the primacy of Marxist frameworks in Jameson effectively denies politics of identity. This insistence increasingly sees his work askance with several developments within literary theory—particularly affect theory or work that seeks to consider the subaltern. His focus on the “impersonality” of consciousness in The Antinomies of Realism is a more recent example of this tendency. This book has only briefly mapped this tendency in Jameson—the chapter on post-war fiction did not discuss his later engagements with figures such as Toni Morrison, for example.

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Nevertheless, my work has sought to consider how these omissions in Jameson’s purview, both in terms of theoretical and reading practice, offer the opportunity for scholarship that integrates elements of his criticism with recent developments in interpretive production. Jameson’s textual interests often restrict the implementation of his theoretical work in other ways. Jameson often delineates generic boundaries and specifies certain authors as paradigmatic examples of literary forms and periods. Furthermore, he makes efforts to differentiate the formal capacities of certain genres and classes of literature from each other. This book has discussed ways in which these operations function as expressions of Jameson’s own taste, but also limit interpretive options. For postmodern literature in particular, or the generic fiction of the nineteenth century, this can have the effect of denying a text a variety of political, historical and cultural valences. Perhaps most problematic for Jameson’s larger oeuvre is the sense that these matters of taste directly impact on his portrayal of historical periods: the nineteenth century is seen predominantly through the prism of high-realist French literature, while postmodern literature’s limitations mirror criticisms of the period as a whole. If his notion of historical change is more complex than some critics admit, his conventional understanding of the canon can circumscribe this complexity. When his engagement with a literary form largely avoids this problem, as with high modernism, Jameson’s discussion becomes ambiguous and shifting in an intriguing fashion. The depiction of high modernism may remain less comprehensive within his body of work, however, it also allows for a more heterogeneous sense of the early twentieth century. Furthermore, in his later work on contemporary literature and film, these categories of genre and canon have diminished somewhat. He continues to use notions of generic form as guiding parameters, but the classificatory procedure loses much of its weight. As “The Aesthetics of Singularity” suggests, Jameson’s views of postmodern cultural material are in the process of changing, at the same time as high and low cultural boundaries are in the process of disappearing more completely. Although the early postmodern essays lament certain aspects of high and low cultural forms in postmodernity, it would seem that this particular dissolution has opened Jameson’s theory in a number of directions. His work no longer aims to contain literary forms that do not offer the kind of mapping qualities integral to his Marxist project. Meanwhile, the genuine change in his readings of certain forms of contemporary cultural material suggests that these forms have begun

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to alter in a significant manner, particularly in comparison with the texts found in his early postmodern essays. Perhaps most intriguingly, this work indicates that cultural forms have begun to shift drastically from the earlier moment of postmodernity that his famous essays delineate. Whether this signifies a larger structural shift in our current historical situation remains to be seen. As our sense of literary interpretation, historical development and cultural theory continue to develop, this book has suggested ways in which Jameson’s theoretical frameworks remain useful for scholarly work. The focus on Jameson as a reader of literature has provided a new perspective for considering his career, one that sees his major contributions to critical discourse as situated within a rich body of work that has consistently progressed over the past several decades. My work has referred to ongoing developments in scholarly production: surface reading, affect theory, object and thing theory, alternate modernities, peripheral realisms, work on the cosmopolitan, theories of the post-postmodern and contemporary postmodern literary criticism. Nearly all of this work relies on literature as its primary interpretive focus, even as it theorises variant aspects of cultural experience. It is a testament to Jameson’s influence that these often programmatic attempts to define a new interpretive method must engage with his theory in some manner. Surface reading defines Jameson’s symptomatic practice in specific terms, in order to move past interpretive strategies that concentrate on the hidden depths of a text. Contemporary work on the post-war novel seeks to widen our perception of the postmodern turn, often arguing against criticism that has taken the more famous of Jameson’s pronouncements on postmodernity as the guiding parameters for its practice. This book has often worked to broaden a more general perception of Jameson’s theory through performing close readings of his sense of genre, historical periods and cultural possibility. If this work has achieved its intentions, it should now seem that some of the oppositions suggested in both Jameson’s work and the scholarly ambits that have defined themselves in relation to him are often arbitrary, and that these reading practices have more in common with Jameson than is typically recognised. In this manner, while Jameson’s interaction with alternate modernities or geomodernisms remains brief, his theory of the modern as discussed in A Singular Modernity offers the opportunity for larger mapping procedures. The text has been a source of some controversy for Jameson and he has stated: “I’m sorry to say that after the publication of A

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Singular Modernity, in which the very concept of ‘alternate modernities’ was dismissed, my Chinese and Brazilian readers seem to have parted company with me, accusing me of being yet another Western or first world theorist preaching to the rest of the world and seeking to impose Western theories on it” [10, p. 7]. This book has traced moments where Jameson implicitly or explicitly works from a thoroughly Western perspective. It should be noted that his insistence on the ultimately determining factor of modern history, that of Western capitalist development, allows for a multitude of national situations, however much they remain tied to the development of the empirical centre. With this in mind, work on alternate modernities and Jameson’s work on modernism nevertheless have several similar attributes. Both often see texts as mapping procedures, and, in this regard, work on peripheral realism has similar affinities. Esty and Lye have argued for a sense of realism in the peripheral against notions of the modern: the extension of modernist studies to a vast array of “late modernist” cultural products, and indeed the rediscovery (by Anglo-American scholars) of early modernisms in Mexico, China, and Persia, cannot fully shed the … attachment to metropolitan avant-gardism. Nor can it account, we think, for other genealogies of the global novel stretching across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as the realist call to arms of Seán Ó Faoláin in the wake of Joyce or Naguib Mahfouz’s insistence on the social novel after the peak influence of Egyptian surrealism. [11, p. 275]

The extent to which so much of the scholarly material concentrates on mapping procedures belies the degree to which they are seeking similar ends: more complex and appropriate models for understanding the complicated intersection between culture, history, economics, the subject and the material. Each ambit concentrates on particular texts, or groups of texts, and focuses on particular terminology, as it is useful. As Jameson’s material on The Wire suggests, these cultural items remain confined by structural limits. Meanwhile, as alternate modernities claim space for the subaltern and the peripheral within a more traditional Western canon of modernism, Western experiences of global capitalism are less discussed. Why do reading practices in this vein not strive to see texts in relation to each other, as overlapping mapping procedures? Jameson’s reading of Ulysses sees the text as providing a unique model for mapping wider aspects of imperialist capitalism, one that other national situations could

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not replicate. How his reading of Howards End from the same essay might interact with the readings of Lu Xun and Ousmane Sembène remains to be seen. Susan Stanford Friedman has argued for a new kind of transnational approach … a reading strategy I call cultural parataxis, by which I mean a juxtaposition of texts from different times and places for the new light this geopolitical conjuncture spreads on each…. Cultural parataxis invites a new form of comparativism, one not based solely on … tracing the itineraries of influence often from a presumed Western center to non-Western peripheries. [12, p. 245]

The mapping of both connections and gaps both in and between texts offers the potential for more dramatic and globally inclusive models of literature. In this regard, the large body of work Jameson has produced investigating notions of the cognitive map provide several well-developed parameters from which to extend this notion of cultural parataxis. Here, we might move beyond certain boundaries surrounding texts, their authors, and the critics who discuss them. My work has often traced the problems that arise as a result of Jameson’s canonising gestures, or sought to consider how his comments about taste can reconcile with his claims for critical distance when considering cultural histories. These issues are a result of inevitable idiosyncrasies, ones that will arise in any singular body of work. Jameson’s ironic and nimble engagement with this aspect of his oeuvre often seeks to admit as such. These criticisms of his theoretical and literary work are not then in the service of painting him personally as culturally imperialist. Instead, this book has sought to consider how his work might interact with other interpretive perspectives, or how it might apply to literatures outside of his purview. At the same time, my work has aimed to broaden a more general perception of Jameson. His career is often defined in terms of his most famous work, and certain criticisms of his theory have persisted from the 1980s onwards. My work has aimed to delineate to the careful, contextual and contingent manner in which he makes his larger claims, as well as to the way in which his oeuvre, for all its moments of uniformity, remains in a constant state of flux. Jameson’s thought aims for larger and broader structures, but remains resolutely dialectical: it shifts in its constant negotiation of contradiction and possibility. If his literary choices, and the way in which he delineates their Marxist interest, remain restricted in certain ways, this book asserts that—even as we might

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disagree with certain aspects of his work—his body of criticism is not the rigid and remote structure that it occasionally appears to be. As we continue to place Jameson within certain frameworks—Marxism, postmodernism, symptomatic reading, to name a few—we should seek to consider his larger career, but also how these frameworks will shape a later sense of Jameson’s work. More immediately, if his theory is to remain useful to contemporary scholarly production, we need to be more flexible in our engagement with his work. In essays on the post-postmodern, the impulse to work through Jameson’s canonical portrayals of the period often limits the discussion in certain regards. Just as he has worked to reframe Lukács throughout his career, the challenge for contemporary critics is to rethink Jameson’s theory. For Jameson to remain useful, to both literary criticism and cultural theory alike, we should define his career not only by its most famous moments, but the lengthy articulation of a wide subset of issues and ideas. Through paying attention to Jameson’s literary criticism, and the reflexivity found there, we accentuate the continued opportunity for this kind of engagement.

Note 1. One could certainly ask the same question of Jameson, who has often spoken of Faulkner as a major formative influence, while never discussing the author in detail.

References 1. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. 2. Dunst, Alexander. “Late Jameson, or, After the Eternity of the Present.” New Formations, no. 65 (Autumn 2008): 105–118. https://doi.org/10. 3898/newf.65.07.2008. 3. Jameson, Fredric. The Ideologies of Theory. London: Verso, 2008. 4. Jameson, Fredric. The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms. London: Verso, 2015. 5. Donougho, Martin. “Postmodern Jameson.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner, 75–95. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989. 6. Jameson, Fredric. “In Hyperspace.” Review of Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative, by David Wittenberg. London Review of Books 37,

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8. 9. 10.

11.

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no. 17 (September 10, 2015). Accessed May 23, 2020. https://www.lrb. co.uk/the-paper/v37/n17/fredric-jameson/in-hyperspace. Bennett, Bridget, Rachel Bowlby, Andrew Lawson, Mark Storey, Graham Thompson, and Fredric Jameson. “Roundtable. The Antinomies of Realism.” Journal of American Studies 48, no. 4 (2014): 1069–1086. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0021875814001376. Jameson, Fredric. The Modernist Papers. London: Verso, 2007. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Jameson, Fredric. “Introduction: On Not Giving Interviews.” In Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism, edited by Ian Buchanan, 1–10. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Esty, Jed, and Colleen Lye. “Peripheral Realisms Now.” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 3 (September 2012): 269–288. https://doi.org/10. 1215/00267929-1631397. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Paranoia, Pollution, and Sexuality: Affiliations between E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” In Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, edited by Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, 245–261. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.

Index

A Adorno, Theodor, 6, 32, 33, 82, 94, 105, 108–110 affect, 19, 20, 24, 25, 27, 35, 36, 38, 42, 43, 54, 55, 64–75, 80, 129, 143, 147 Ahmad, Aijaz, 56, 86, 88, 89 alternate modernities, 26, 90, 95, 98, 102, 111, 166, 167 American Graffiti, 124, 129 Atwood, Margaret, 142 The Handmaid’s Tale, 142 The Year of the Flood, 17, 142, 145 Auerbach, Erich, 5 Austen, Jane, 39, 48, 55, 56 B Balzac, Honoré de La Comédie humaine, 41 La Cousine Bette, 8 La Rabouilleuse, 63 Barry Lyndon, 136 Barthes, Roland “L’effet de réel ”, 41, 67

S/Z , 9 Baudrillard, Jean, 13, 16 Benjamin, Walter, 6, 108 bildungsroman, 33, 48 Bloch, Ernst, 6, 7, 12, 90, 108 Bolaño, Roberto, 153 2666, 153 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 55 Brecht, Bertolt, 105, 108, 110, 147 Brennan, Teresa, 66 Brontë, Charlotte, 46, 48, 50, 55 Brontë, Emily, 55 Wuthering Heights , 50, 59 Buchanan, Ian, 2, 5, 17, 89, 104 Burroughs, William S., 92, 116, 122 Naked Lunch, 119

C capitalism, 12, 23, 24, 31, 32, 42, 44, 58–60, 62, 63, 72, 73, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 96, 97, 99, 101, 105, 109, 136, 147, 152, 155, 162–164, 167

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. Cogle, Jameson and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54824-7

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172

INDEX

Chandler, Raymond, 26, 132, 133, 137, 138, 149 Cheah, Pheng, 151, 152 cognitive mapping, 20, 24, 84, 87, 90, 101–103, 117, 132, 134, 147–149, 153, 155, 156, 163 collectivity, 27, 38, 62, 72, 73, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 154 Conrad, Joseph, 2, 10, 24, 34, 57, 61–63, 79, 84, 98, 104, 106, 125 Lord Jim, 44, 62, 106 cosmopolitan, 27, 151, 152, 154, 155, 166 critical theory, 1, 2, 5, 8, 16–19, 22, 27, 72, 129, 151, 159

D Deckard, Sharae, 153 Deleuze, Gilles, 9, 10, 59, 61, 75, 129 DeLillo, Don, 23, 26, 115, 117, 123, 124, 142, 143 Cosmopolis , 143 White Noise, 123, 131 detective fiction, 16, 20, 132, 133, 137, 148 Dickens, Charles, 33, 34, 37, 39, 41, 44–48, 107 Hard Times , 33, 45 Dick, Philip K., 26, 132, 134, 135, 140 Doctorow, E.L., 26, 116–118, 121–124, 127, 129, 131, 132, 144 The Book of Daniel , 118, 127, 129, 131 Ragtime, 96, 118, 123, 127–129 Donougho, Martin, 79, 162 Du Bois, W.E.B., 74 The Souls of Black Folk, 71

Dunst, Alexander, 17, 80, 86, 136, 138, 160

E Eagleton, Terry, 11, 12, 31, 32, 38, 51, 52, 93, 98, 163 Eliot, George, 36, 39, 46, 48, 51–53, 55, 66, 107 Daniel Deronda, 53 Middlemarch, 52, 53 Romola, 53 Eliot, T.S., 86, 92, 98 Esty, Jed, 18, 27, 153, 167 everyday, 12, 35, 38, 51, 56, 67, 68, 70, 74, 75, 99 Expressionism, 108

F fantasy, 41, 51, 121, 128, 135, 139–141, 149 Faulkner, William, 92, 95, 169 Flatley, Jonathan, 38, 66, 71–75 Flaubert, Gustave, 7, 23, 24, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 40–42, 46–48, 56, 59, 62, 67, 73, 76, 91, 164 Madame Bovary, 57 Salammbô, 135, 137 “A Simple Soul”, 41, 42 Ford, Henry, 96 Formalism, 16, 33 Forster, E.M., 23, 98, 100, 102 Howards End, 93, 99, 168 Foucault, Michel, 10, 14, 125, 154 French Revolution, 63 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 102, 103, 168

G Galdós, Benito Pérez, 48, 66, 70 Gartman, David, 97, 98, 100, 110

INDEX

Gaskell, Elizabeth, 46, 55 gender, 37, 55–58 genre, 10, 16, 23, 24, 35, 37–39, 48–50, 52, 54, 55, 58, 64, 65, 70, 121, 132–141, 145, 146, 148, 151, 154, 156, 159, 163, 165, 166 Gibson, William, 135 Neuromancer, 156 Pattern Recognition, 142 Gissing, George, 10, 34, 37, 46, 47, 63 Grausam, Daniel, 2, 115, 127, 131 Grossberg, Lawrence, 19, 68, 97 Gross, David S., 14, 15, 103

H Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 4, 5, 17 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 6, 7, 11, 12, 17, 147 Hemingway, Ernest, 25, 33, 91, 92 hermeneutics of suspicion, 19, 69, 70 Homer, Sean, 1, 2, 5, 16, 17, 60 Horne, Haynes, 60, 81 Hungerford, Amy, 2, 115, 117, 119, 127, 131 Hutcheon, Linda, 115, 128

I imperialism, 26, 44, 86, 90, 95, 100 Inception, 146

J James, Henry, 69, 94, 107 Jameson, Fredric The Ancients and the Postmoderns , 145, 148, 150, 155, 161, 163 The Antinomies of Realism, 20, 21, 25, 35–39, 43, 47, 48, 51–53, 55–57, 61, 63–67, 70, 71, 73,

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75, 79, 81, 93, 95, 116, 132, 145, 164 Archaeologies of the Future, 26, 51, 72, 116, 138–145, 148, 156 “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism”, 72, 83, 91, 106 Fables of Aggression, 25, 80, 83, 92, 99, 109, 110 The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, 70, 116, 164 “Imaginary and Symbolic in La Rabouilleuse”, 40, 46 Marxism and Form: TwentiethCentury Dialectical Theories of Literature, 1, 6–9, 11, 17, 32, 42–44, 83, 159 “Metacommentary”, 8, 9, 17, 103, 119 The Modernist Papers , 16, 25, 80, 93, 95, 163 “On Raymond Chandler”, 85, 96, 119, 133, 136, 138 The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act , 1, 2, 6, 8–12, 15, 19, 20, 24, 25, 31, 32, 34–40, 44, 46, 49–51, 57–61, 63, 64, 66, 69, 75, 79, 80, 83, 84, 98, 102, 104, 109, 127, 159, 162 Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1, 2, 6, 12, 13, 16, 20, 66, 69, 80, 116, 119, 136, 147, 160 The Prison-House of Language, 8, 16, 17, 33, 34 “The Realist Floor-Plan”, 40, 42, 44, 57, 59, 60, 67, 73, 75 “Reflections on the Brecht-Lukács Debate”, 110

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“Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture”, 119, 121 Sartre: The Origins of a Style, 5, 81 A Singular Modernity, 16, 25, 61, 80, 89, 94, 95, 98, 107, 116, 166 “Symptoms of Theory, or Symptoms for Theory?”, 72 “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, 25, 56, 86 “Ulysses in History”, 80, 94, 104 Jaws , 121, 122 Joyce, James, 23, 25, 82, 86, 92–94, 100, 102, 104, 117, 125, 163 Ulysses , 4, 35, 93–95, 100, 102, 104–106, 145, 167 K Kafka, Franz, 104, 105 Kellner, Douglas, 1, 14, 16 Kluge, Alexander, 118 Chronik der Gefuhle, 36 Kraus, Chris, 131 L Lacan, Jacques, 13, 75, 129, 150 late capitalism, 15, 25, 26, 62, 66, 68, 73, 97, 115, 119, 121, 129, 135, 147, 151, 153 late modernism, 81, 89, 92, 93 Lazarus, Neil, 17, 18, 87 Le Guin, Ursula, 26, 57, 132, 134, 135, 140–142 Always Coming Home, 141 Lem, Stanislaw, 26, 132, 135, 140 Solaris , 143, 144 Levine, Paul, 127 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 10, 33 Lewis, Wyndham, 25, 82, 83, 98, 99, 102

Tarr, 99 Lukács, Georg, 3, 6, 7, 11, 24, 32, 33, 36, 37, 41–43, 49, 51, 52, 58, 101, 105, 108–110, 169 The Historical Novel , 41, 135 History and Class Consciousness , 6, 101, 109 Lutz, Tom, 152, 153 Lu, Xun, 87, 168 Lye, Colleen, 18, 27, 153, 167 Lyotard, Jean-François, 13, 15, 16, 60, 68, 115, 120

M Mandel, Ernest, 97, 151, 162 Mann, Thomas, 43, 82, 94, 104, 105, 108 Marcus, Sharon, 18, 19, 21 Massumi, Brian, 19, 68 McGurl, Mark, 115, 163 melodrama, 36, 37, 43, 47, 51–54 Mitchell, David, 116 Cloud Atlas , 116, 146–148 Munch, Edvard “The Scream”, 68, 69

N Nabokov, Vladimir, 81, 92, 119, 142, 161 Lolita, 93 national allegory, 87, 89, 99, 101 naturalism, 34, 40, 42, 43, 47, 83, 108, 153 New Criticism, 5, 6, 9, 40, 64 Ngai, Sianne, 19, 38, 55, 56, 66, 70–75, 164 nostalgia, 81, 96, 121, 129, 148 nostalgia film, 123–125, 132, 136 nouveau roman, 118, 119

INDEX

P Parks, John G., 127 Parrish, Timothy, 2, 15, 115, 119, 120, 127 peripheral realisms, 27, 151, 152, 155, 166, 167 postcolonial studies, 2, 18, 27, 89, 102, 117, 144, 151, 152, 156, 164 postnationalism, 151 poststructuralism, 9, 14, 64, 110, 125, 127 Pound, Ezra, 86, 92, 95, 98 Propp, Vladimir, 33, 45 Proust, Marcel, 25, 82, 86, 92, 94, 100 Pynchon, Thomas, 23, 26, 115–119, 121, 122, 124–126, 131, 132, 148, 156 The Crying of Lot 49, 118, 124–127 R reification, 10, 15, 24, 26, 35, 42, 49, 58, 62–64, 67, 68, 72–75, 82–86, 92, 105, 106, 109, 110, 117, 153 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 118, 119 romance, 24, 34, 37, 39, 48–51, 54, 55, 61 S Said, Edward, 12, 87, 93, 106 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 4–6, 53 Schoene, Berthold, 152–154 science fiction, 16, 20, 23, 26, 35, 50, 54, 57, 116, 131–146, 148, 149, 160 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 19, 21, 27, 55, 66, 69–71 Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 69

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Sembène, Ousmane, 87, 168 Shoop, Casey, 125–127, 129, 131, 132 Short Cuts , 150, 151 Single White Female, 72, 74 S¯ oseki, Natsume, 86, 100 Spencer, Robert, 152 Structuralism, 33 style indirect libre, 36, 42, 56 subjectivity, 14, 19, 24, 38, 42, 59, 60, 64, 67, 69, 71, 75, 94, 129, 131, 146, 148, 151, 152 symptomatic reading, 18, 19, 27, 37, 64, 66, 69, 73, 129, 169

T Tally Jr, Robert T., 17, 20, 103, 154 Terada, Rei, 21, 66 Thackeray, William, 46 Tolstoy, Leo, 32, 33, 36, 39, 57, 62, 63, 70, 71, 73, 145 totality, 3, 7, 9, 11, 14, 22, 38, 40, 60, 81, 87, 101, 138, 150, 153, 154, 161, 163, 164

U utopia, 57, 137, 143–145

V van Gogh, Vincent, 2, 85, 119 “A Pair of Boots”, 79, 85

W Wallace, David Foster, 142, 143, 148 Infinite Jest , 118, 143 Warhol, Andy, 2, 85, 92, 116, 118, 123 “Diamond Dust Shoes”, 69, 85, 119

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INDEX

Watkins, Evan, 11, 17, 60 Watt, Ian, 36, 106 The Rise of the Novel , 44 Wegner, Philip E., 79, 80, 83, 107, 140, 141, 156 Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, The University, and the Desire for Narrative, 17 West, Cornel, 3 Western Marxism, 39, 109, 110 Williams, Raymond, 10, 31, 44, 45, 109, 162

The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, 44 Wire, The, 17, 148–150, 155, 167 Woolf, Virginia, 50, 55, 93, 94, 100, 102, 111 To the Lighthouse, 93 The Voyage Out , 93

Z Zola, Émile, 24, 32, 35, 37, 40, 42, 43, 47, 48, 59, 65, 70, 73, 125