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Fredric Jameson: a theory bookshelf

Books from the leading Marxist critic, alongside related reading including Sartre, Adorno, and Žižek.

Verso Books31 July 2019

Fredric Jameson: a theory bookshelf

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 The Ancients and the Postmoderns, The Antinomies of RealismPostmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late CapitalismThe Cultural Turn, A Singular ModernityThe Modernist PapersArchaeologies of the FutureBrecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.

Allegory and Ideology is a major new work by Jameson that proposes a dialectic capable of holding together the heterogeneities that reflect our biological individualities, and our alienation to a disembodied new world of information and abstraction.

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Fredric Jameson takes on the allegorical form.

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High modernism is now as far from us as antiquity was for the Renaissance. Such is the premise of Fredric Jameson’s major new work in which modernist works, this time in painting and music, are pitted against late-modernist ones (in film) as well as a variety of postmodern experiments: all of which attempt, in their different ways, to invent new forms to grasp a specific social totality.

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In this major new study, the philosopher and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson offers a new reading of Hegel’s foundational text Phenomenology of Spirit.

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The master of literary theory takes on the master of the detective novel.

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Controversial manifesto by acclaimed cultural theorist debated by leading writers.

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The Modernist Papers is a tour de force of analysis and criticism, in which Jameson brings his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

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Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism’s emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history.

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Representing Capital, Fredric Jameson's first book-length engagement with Marx's magnum opus, is a unique work of scholarship that records the progression of Marx's thought as if it were a musical score.

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A major interpretation of the concepts of modernism and modernity.

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The legacy of Bertolt Brecht is much contested, whether by those who wish to forget or to vilify his politics, but his stature as the outstanding political playwright and poet of the twentieth century is unforgettably established in this major critical work. Fredric Jameson elegantly dissects the intricate connections between Brecht's drama and politics, demonstrating the way these combined to shape a unique and powerful influence on a profoundly troubled epoch.

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A comprehensive analysis of the philosophy of the dialectic.

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An accessible introduction to the key writings on postmodernism by the influential Marxist critic.

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Ideologies of Theory, updated and available for the first time in a single volume, brings together theoretical essays that span Fredric Jameson’s long career as a critic. They chart a body of work suspended by the twin poles of literary scholarship and political history, occupying a space vibrant with the tension between critical exegesis and the Marxist intellectual tradition. 

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Jameson’s controversial reading of one of the great twentieth-century writers.

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The relationship between utopia and science fiction, in the age of globalization.

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Jameson argues persuasively that Adorno's contribution to the development of Marxism remains unique and indispensable. He shows how Adorno's work on aesthetics performs deconstructive operations yet is in sharp distinction to the now canonical deconstructive genre of writing. He explores the complexity of Adorno's very timely affirmation of philosophy — of its possibility after the “end” of grand theory. 

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In his most wide-ranging and accessible work, Frederic Jameson argues that postmodernism is the cultural response to the latest systemic change in world capitalism. He seeks here to crystallize a definition of a term which has taken on so many meanings that it has virtually lost all historical significance.

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A history of the postmodern, and the role of Fredric Jameson in shaping it.

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Volume One of Sartre's intellectual masterpiece, introduced by Fredric Jameson.

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Volume Two of Sartre's intellectual masterpiece, introduced by Fredric Jameson.

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A new vision of politics “below the radar”

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Provocative reassessment of the Great Terror as a price worth paying.

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Mapping Ideology is a comprehensive reader covering the most important contemporary writing on the subject. Including Slavoj Žižek’s study of the development of the concept from Marx to the present, assessments of the contributions of Lukács and the Frankfurt School by Terry Eagleton, Peter Dews and Seyla Benhabib, and essays by Adorno, Lacan and Althusser, Mapping Ideology is an invaluable guide to the most dynamic field in cultural theory.

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In a timely intervention in one of today's most vital theoretical debates, the contributors to Ghostly Demarcations respond to the distinctive program projected by Specters of Marx. The volume features sympathetic meditations on the relationship between Marxism and deconstruction by Fredric Jameson, Werner Hamacher, Antonio Negri, Warren Montag, and Rastko Möcnik, brief polemical reviews by Terry Eagleton and Pierre Macherey, and sustained political critiques by Tom Lewis and Aijaz Ahmad. The volume concludes with Derrida's reply to his critics in which he sharpens his views about the vexed relationship between Marxism and deconstruction.

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A dazzling re-evaluation of Jacques Lacan, uncovering his hidden inspirations.

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For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectured on Capital, becoming one of the world’s foremost Marx scholars. Based on his recent lectures, this current volume—finally bringing together his guides to volumes I, II and much of III—presents this depth of learning to a broader audience, guiding first-time readers through a fascinating and deeply rewarding text. A Companion to Marx’s Capital offers fresh, original, and sometimes critical interpretations of a book that changed the course of history and, as Harvey intimates, may do so again.

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A classic of twentieth-century thought, charting how society devours itself through the very rationality that was meant to set it free.

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A guide to the thinkers and ideas that will shape the future.

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Žižek analyzes the end of the world at the hands of the “four riders of the apocalypse.”

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Gillian Rose shows Adorno’s most important contribution to be his founding of a Marxist aesthetic that offers a sociology of culture, as demonstrated in his essays on Kafka, Mann, Beckett, Brecht and Schönberg. Finally, Adorno’s ‘Melancholy Science’ is revealed to offer a ‘sociology of illusion’ that rivals both structural Marxism and phenomenological sociology as well as the subsequent work of the Frankfurt School.

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The definitive biography of Karl Marx.

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Who were the Frankfurt School—Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Horkheimer—and why do they matter today?

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An intense and lively debate on literature and art between thinkers who became some of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and literature.

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Five-hundred-year anniversary edition of More’s Utopia, with writing from major science fiction writers.

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Benjamin's most sustained and original work, and one of the main sources of literary modernism.

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The sociologist and philosopher analyses the dawning of modernity.

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With a demonstrably thorough grasp of Marxist thought, and seemingly effortless literary flair, Ernst Bloch provides both the well-versed reader and the novice a truly enjoyable introduction to one of the most influential thinkers in history.

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A major work of Marxist theory—rigorous, clear-minded and well-researched.

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Ahmad reworks the terrain of cultural theory in this spirited critique.

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Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the symbolism of slaughter – not merely the reality of death, but in a sacrifice that challenges the whole system. Where previously the old revolutionary sought to conduct a struggle between real forces in the context of ideology and politics, the new terrorist mounts a powerful symbolic challenge which, when combined with high-tech resources, constitutes an unprecedented assault on an over-sophisticated and vulnerable West. This new edition is updated with the essays “Hypotheses on Terrorism” and “Violence of the Global.”

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The great theorist of radical liberation analyzes the relationship between authority and freedom.

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A comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century.

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The celebrated literary critic Raymond Williams, in his own words.

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The essays collected here testify to Deleuze’s fundamental conviction that philosophy cannot be undertaken independently of science and art. As so often in his writing, the names of philosophers such as Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger appear beside those of literary figures including Melville, Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Beckett and Artaud. With this book, Deleuze’s life-long ambition to dismantle the barriers between art and its adjacent domains is brilliantly realized.

Allegory and Ideology
Works do not have meanings, they soak up meanings: a work is a machine for libidinal investments (including the political kind). It is a process that sorts incommensurabilities and registers contra...
The Ancients and the Postmoderns
High modernism is now as far from us as antiquity was for the Renaissance. Such is the premise of Fredric Jameson’s major new work in which modernist works, this time in painting (Rubens) and music...
The Hegel Variations
In this major new study, the philosopher and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson offers a new reading of Hegel’s foundational text Phenomenology of Spirit.In contrast to those who see the Phenomenolo...
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler, a dazzling stylist and portrayer of American life, holds a unique place in literary history, straddling both pulp fiction and modernism. With The Big Sleep, published in 1939, he ...
An American Utopia

An American Utopia

Fredric Jameson’s pathbreaking essay “An American Utopia” radically questions standard leftist notions of what constitutes an emancipated society. Advocated here are—among other things—universal co...
The Modernist Papers
The Modernist Papers is a tour de force of analysis and criticism, in which Jameson brings his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centurie...
The Antinomies of Realism
The Antinomies of Realism is a history of the nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it imp...
Representing 'Capital'
Representing Capital, Fredric Jameson's first book-length engagement with Marx's magnum opus, is a unique work of scholarship that records the progression of Marx's thought as if it were a musica...
A Singular Modernity
The concepts of modernity and modernism are amongst the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this intervention, Fredric Jameson—perhaps the m...
Brecht and Method
The legacy of Bertolt Brecht is much contested, whether by those who wish to forget or to vilify his politics, but his stature as the outstanding political playwright and poet of the twentieth cent...
Valences of the Dialectic
After half a century exploring dialectical thought, renowned cultural critic Fredric Jameson presents a comprehensive study of a misunderstood yet vital strain in Western philosophy. The dialectic,...
The Cultural Turn
Fredric Jameson, a leading voice on the subject of postmodernism, assembles his most powerful writings on the culture of late capitalism in this essential volume. Classic insights on pastiche, nost...
Ideologies of Theory
Ideologies of Theory, updated and available for the first time in a single volume, brings together theoretical essays that span Fredric Jameson’s long career as a critic. They chart a body of work ...
Fables of Aggression
The novels of Wyndham Lewis have generally been associated with the work of the great modernists—Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Yeats—who were his sometime friends and collaborators. Lewis’s originality, how...
Archaeologies of the Future
In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful? Archaeologies of the...
Late Marxism
In the name of an assault on “totalization” and “identity,” a number of contemporary theorists have been busily washing Marxism’s dialectical and utopian projects down the plug-hole of postmodernis...
Postmodernism
In his most wide-ranging and accessible work, Frederic Jameson argues that postmodernism is the cultural response to the latest systemic change in world capitalism. He seeks here to crystallize a d...
Paperback
The Origins of Postmodernity
Where does the idea of the postmodern come from? Who first conceived, and who developed it? How have its meanings changed? What purposes do they serve? These are the questions addressed in The Orig...
Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1

Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1

At the height of the Algerian war, Jean-Paul Sartre embarked on a fundamental reappraisal of his philosophical and political thought. The result was the Critique of Dialectical Reason, an intellect...
Paperback
Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 2
Does history produce discernible meaning? Are human struggles intelligible? These questions form the starting-point for the second volume of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Drafted in 1958...
Unexceptional Politics
Unexceptional Politics develops a vocabulary of terms drawn from a wide range of media (political fiction, art, film, and TV serials), highlighting the scams, imbroglios, information trafficking, b...
In Defence of the Terror
For two hundred years after the French Revolution, the Republican tradition celebrated the execution of princes and aristocrats, defending the Terror that the Revolution inflicted upon on its enemi...
Mapping Ideology

Mapping Ideology

For a long time, the term ‘ideology’ was in disrepute, having become associated with such unfashionable notions as fundamental truth and the eternal verities. The tide has turned, and recent years ...
Ghostly Demarcations

Ghostly Demarcations

With the publication of Specters of Marx in 1993, Jacques Derrida redeemed a longstanding pledge to confront Marx’s texts directly and in detail. His characteristically bravura presentation provide...
Lacan

Lacan

Jacques Lacan is the foremost psychoanalytic theorist after Freud. Revolutionising the study of social relations, his work has been a major influence on political theory, philosophy, literature and...
A Companion To Marx's Capital
In recent years, we have witnessed a surge of interest in Marx’s work in the effort to understand the origins of our current predicament. For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectur...
Dialectic of Enlightenment

Dialectic of Enlightenment

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer are the leading figures of the Frankfurt School and this book is their magnum opus. Dialectic of Enlightenment is one of the most celebrated works of modern social...
Paperback
General Intellects
What happened to the public intellectuals that used to challenge and inform us? Who is the Sartre or De Beauvoir of the internet age? General Intellects argues that we no longer have such singular ...
Living in the End Times
There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. But if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western ...
The Melancholy Science
The Melancholy Science is Gillian Rose’s investigation into Theodor Adorno’s work and legacy. Rose uncovers the unity discernable among the many fragments of Adorno’s oeuvre, and argues that his...
A World to Win

A World to Win

Karl Marx has fascinated and inspired generations of radicals in the past 200 years. In this new, definitive biography, Sven-Eric Liebman makes his work live once more for a new generation. Despite...
Grand Hotel Abyss
In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Among the most prominen...
Aesthetics and Politics
No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics...
Utopia
Five hundred years since its first publication, Thomas More’s Utopia remains astonishingly radical and provocative. More imagines an island nation where thousands live in peace and harmony, men and...
The Origin of German Tragic Drama

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seve...
Introduction to Modernity

Introduction to Modernity

Originally published in 1962, when Lefebvre was beginning his career as a lecturer in sociology at the University of Strasbourg, it established his position in the vanguard of a movement which was ...
On Karl Marx
This study of Marx serves not only as an excellent introduction to that most influential of "worldly philosophers" but is also a significant resume of the central issues of Bloch's own profound and...
Logics of Disintegration
Over the last two decades, contemporary French philosophy has exercised a powerful influence on intellectual life, across both Europe and America. Post-structuralist strategies and concepts have pl...
In Theory
After the Second World War, nationalism emerged as the principle expression of resistance to Western imperialism in a variety of regions from the Indian subcontinent to Africa, to parts of Latin Am...
The Spirit of Terrorism

The Spirit of Terrorism

Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the symbolism of slaughter—not merely the reality of death, but in a sacrifice that challenges the whole system. Where previously the old re...
A Study on Authority

A Study on Authority

This is the first paperback edition of what is now recognized as Marcuse’s most important collection of writings on philosophy. He analyzes and attacks some of the main intellectual currents of Eur...
Paperback
Culture and Materialism
A comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century.Raymond Williams is a towering presence in cultural studies, most importantly as the founde...
Politics and Letters

Politics and Letters

Raymond Williams made a central contribution to the intellectual culture of the Left in the English-speaking world. He was also one of the key figures in the foundation of cultural studies in Bri...
Essays Critical and Clinical
“Authors, if they are great, are more like doctors than patients: they are themselves astonishing diagnosticians or symptomatologists.” So wrote the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, setting himself the ...
Paperback