Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.Blog
COMPETITION: Win the entire Radical Thinkers backlist!
And here are the answers you've all been so patiently waiting for. Congratulations to our incredibly well-read winners!
Get your radical thinking caps on...To celebrate the publication of Set 5 of the Radical Thinkers series, Verso is offering 2 lucky winners the chance to win all available titles in the five sets published to date.
The highly popular series publishes new editions of important works of continental philosophy in beautifully-designed and affordable editions. Covering the full spectrum of critical thought, the series includes work from radical thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno and many more.
First published in 2005, there are now 60 titles in the series. In 2009, set 4 was launched with a stunning and acclaimed new cover design from Rumors, which has become a hallmark of the series. They have been widely praised, including in the Guardian, Bookforum and the New Statesman.
Competition now closed: win Fredric Jameson books to mark new Vorticists exhibition
To mark the new exhibition, Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World, which opens at the Tate Britain today, Verso are giving away Fredric Jameson's classic book, Fables of Agression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, along with two of his other books.
While Fables of Agression primarily focuses on Wyndham Lewis' novels, Lewis was also the founder of the short-lived avant-garde Vorticist art and poetry movement. Among its other key members were the artists Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and it was also linked with modernist poets Ezra Pound, who gave the movement its name, and T. S Eliot).
The Tate exhibition focuses on the art of the Vorticist movement and the paintings of Lewis, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, showcased in the only two Vorticist exhibitions ever to have taken place. It also highlights the often overlooked female Vorticists, who included Helen Saunders and Dorothy Shakespear. From the exhibition blurb:
Vorticism was a radical art movement that shone briefly but brightly in the years before and during World War I. This exhibition celebrates the full electrifying force and vitality of this short-lived but pivotal modernist movement that was based in London but international in make-up and ambition ...
This exhibition aims to shine a new light on this revolutionary group of artists, presenting the style, radical aesthetics and thoughts of one of the most truly avant-garde art movements in British history.
Choice reviews Jameson's The Hegel Variations
An new review from Choice offers a useful summary of Fredric Jameson's The Hegel Variations: on the Phenomenology of Spirit:
Although best known as a Marxist theoretician, Jameson (Duke Univ.) long has declared his debt to Hegel's Phenomenology. Yet Jameson's distance is evident in the title's musical allusion, in turn owing something to Adorno's advocacy of variation form—development that keeps its options open. Mediating the poles of formalism and hermeneutics, structure and narrative (or history), his approach, he says, "might helpfully defamiliarize readings of Hegel's texts as a whole, recasting each moment as a determinate variation on subject/object ratios." Not everyone will admire Jameson's heavy dialectical machinery. But once in gear it yields a series of audacious reading of a "non-teleological" Hegel, throwing a distinctive light on such themes as master-slave dialectic, linguistic subjectivity, expressive production ("the animal kingdom of spirit"), normative division in the Antigone (inaugurating chapter 6, "Spirit"), and the French Revolution. Jameson then projects a history that extends modernism into contemporary globalism, and finally sketches out a reading of Hegel on religious picture-thinking (Vorstellung) interpreted in turn as allegory. It is material enough for several books. Recommended.
[M. Donougho, University of South Carolina—Columbia]
Books
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Representing Capital
A radical rereading of Marx’s central work by the prolific cultural theorist and philosopher.
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Brecht and Method
“Elegant dissection of Brecht’s method, from estrangements to allegory and beyond.”—Modern Drama
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Valences of the Dialectic
A comprehensive analysis of the philosophy of the dialectic.
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The Hegel Variations
The master philosopher and cultural theorist tackles the founder of modern dialectics.
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The Cultural Turn
An accessible introduction to the key writings on postmodernism by the influential Marxist critic.
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Ideologies of Theory
An expanded and updated collection of Jameson's essays.
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Fables of Aggression
Jameson’s controversial reading of one of the great twentieth-century writers.
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The Modernist Papers
A new perspective on Proust, Joyce, Kafka and others from a master of literary theory.
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Archaeologies of the Future
The relationship between utopia and science fiction, in the age of globalization.
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Late Marxism
A lively and lucid introduction to the work of Theodor Adorno.
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A Singular Modernity
A major new interpretation of the concepts of modernism and modernity.