One of our most important contemporary literary critics, Fredric Jameson, has passed away at the age of 90.
“Jameson’s work fundamentally reshaped our understanding of culture, politics and aesthetics, leaving behind an enduring legacy that has inspired generations of thinkers, activists and scholars.
From his early encounter with Sartre’s work to his lifelong engagement with Hegel and Marx, Lukács and Adorno, Benjamin and Althusser, Jameson devoted much of his intellectual energies to explore the deep ties between ideology and aesthetics, culture and economy, language and history in literature, architecture and film.
His famous dictum, ‘always historicise!’ was part and parcel of his militant commitment to a materialist reading of moments of struggle and revolt, utopia and liberation in cultural texts. His enormous body of work, including Marxism and Form (1971), The Prison-House of Language (1972), The Political Unconscious (1981), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Signatures of the Visible (1992) and The Antinomies of Realism (2013) restructured our Marxist vocabulary and set a new direction in cultural theory”, says historicalmaterialism.org.
Compared to and often pitched against his contemporary, the late Harold Bloom, Jameson was known as an enormously prolific, influential mind who inspired generations of students.
A cultural critic, he set the tone as being demanding, unapologetic, and uncompromising.
“Throughout his career, the critic Fredric Jameson has pitted himself against reductive Marxist approaches to culture and a close reading tradition blind to politics”, says Robert Tally for the Jacobin.
In short, he is best known for breaking down Marxism of German origin to American intellectuals.
Slovenian bear’s ‘shocking’ death blamed on authorities’ negligence
