Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism

Product Description

Fredric Jameson is one of the most influential literary and cultural critics writing today. He is a theoretical innovator whose ideas about the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences. Bringing together ten interviews conducted between 1982 and 2005,
Jameson on Jameson is a compellingly candid introduction to his thought for those new to it, and a rich source of illumination and clarification for those seeking deeper understanding. Jameson discusses his intellectual and political preoccupations, most prominently his commitment to Marxism as a way of critiquing capitalism and the culture it has engendered. He explains many of his key concepts, including postmodernism, the dialectic, metacommentary, the political unconscious, the utopian, cognitive mapping, and spatialization.

Jameson on Jameson displays Jameson’s extraordinary grasp of contemporary culture—architecture, art, cinema, literature, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and urban geography—as well as the challenge that the geographic reach of his thinking poses to the Eurocentricity of the West. Conducted by accomplished scholars from United States, Egypt, Korea, China, Sweden, and England, the interviews elicit Jameson’s reflections on the broad international significance of his ideas and their applicability and implications in different cultural and political contexts, including the present phase of globalization.
The volume includes an introduction by Jameson and a comprehensive bibliography of his publications in all languages.
InterviewersMona Abousenna Abbas Al-TonsiSrinivas AravamudanJonathan CullerSara DaniusLeonard GreenSabry HafezStuart Hall Stefan JonssonRanjana KhannaRichard KleinHoracio MachinPaik Nak-chungMichael Speaks Anders StephansonXudong Zhang

Review

“Fredric Jameson may well be the greatest intellectual produced by the United States in the last half century. It is difficult to think of anyone else who has made as many, as lasting, and as wide- ranging contributions as Jameson. . . . The present collection of interviews from 1981 to the present, then, stands as a welcome commentary on Jameson’s vast work and an important reflection of the changes in American intellectual life in the period from the last days of the Cold War to the end of the second Bush administration.”
-- Paul Allen Miller ―
Intertexts



“Jameson . . . well known for the amazing variety of subjects he discusses. The many readers who find his style hard to grasp will find considerable help in this collection. . . . The book makes his key concepts accessible. . . . Recommended for literary and cultural criticism collections.”
―
Library Journal
From the Author
Fredric Jameson is William A. Lane, Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. He is the author of many books, including Signatures of the Visible; Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic; The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act; The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism; and Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. His books Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, winner of the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize in 1990, and The Cultures of Globalization (coedited with Masao Miyoshi) are both also published by Duke University Press.
Ian Buchanan is Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. He is a coeditor (with Caren Irr) of On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization. His books Deleuzism: A Metacommentary and A Deleuzian Century? are both also published by Duke University Press.
About the Author

Fredric Jameson is William A. Lane Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. He is the author of many books, including Signatures of th