Reading list

Fredric Jameson: A Giant of Literary and Cultural Theory

Complete your Fredric Jameson bookshelf with his final work, The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present.

Verso Books23 September 2024

Fredric Jameson: A Giant of Literary and Cultural Theory

“Exploding like so many magnesium flares in the night sky, Fredric Jameson’s writings have lit up the shrouded landscape of the postmodern.” - Perry Anderson

Fredric Jameson died on September 22nd, aged 90. Few radical thinkers have had such a phenomenal impact on literary criticism, critical theory, and philosophy. We collected some of his best work on modernism, Benjamin, Hegel, and more below.

On the Verso Blog: a series of short essays focused on the major books in Jameson's oeuvre, to celebrate his 90th birthday. Read them all here.

Jameson's final work on the major figures of French theory

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Literary Theory

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Critical Theory

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Philosophy

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Inventions of a Present

by Fredric Jameson

A novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the naïve reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation and, in the best...

Archaeologies of the Future

by Fredric Jameson

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...

The Antinomies of Realism

by Fredric Jameson

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...

The Benjamin Files

by Fredric Jameson

The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was an anti-p...

Raymond Chandler

by Fredric Jameson

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 ...

The Modernist Papers

by Fredric Jameson

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...

Brecht and Method

by Fredric Jameson

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...

Fables of Aggression

by Fredric Jameson

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...

An American Utopia

by Fredric Jameson

Contributions by Jodi Dean, Saroj Giri, Agon Hamza, Kojin Karatani, Kim Stanley Robinson, Frank Ruda and Kathi Weeks

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...

Representing 'Capital'

by Fredric Jameson

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...

The Cultural Turn

by Fredric Jameson

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

by Fredric Jameson

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 ...

Postmodernism

by Fredric Jameson

In his most wide-ranging and accessible work, Fredric Jameson argues that postmodernism is the cultural response to the latest systemic change in world capitalism. He seeks here to crystallize a de...

The Years of Theory

by Fredric Jameson

Edited by Carson Welch

Fredric Jameson introduces here the major themes of French theory: existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. In a series of accessible lect...