The Modernist Papers

The Modernist Papers

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Renowned literary and cultural theorist with his writings on the modernist tradition

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. Jameson discusses modernist poetics, including the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, Joyce, Proust and Thomas Mann. He explores the peculiarities of the American literary field, taking in William Carlos Williams and the American epic, and examines the language theories of Gertrude Stein. Refusing to see modernism as simply a Western phenomenon, he also pays close attention to its Japanese expression, while the complexities of a late modernist representation of twentieth-century politics are articulated in a concluding section on Peter Weiss’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance. Challenging our previous understandings of the literature of this period, this monumental work will come to be regarded as the classic study of modernism.

Reviews

  • Fredric Jameson is America’s leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction.

    Terry Eagleton
  • Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today … It can truly be said that nothing cultural is alien to him.

    Colin MacCabe
  • Jameson’s chef d’oeuvre, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, provides one of the more persuasive cognitive maps we have of the evolution of culture in the West in the period from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. His achievement is all the more notable in that he is by conviction a Marxist, hostile to Anglo-American empiricism, the anti-theoretical theory that reigns supreme today.

    J. M. CoetzeeAustralian Book Review