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Forthcoming
Inventions of a Present:The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization
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Ebook
Forthcoming
The giant of literary theory analyses the novel: Conrad, James, Atwood, Oe, Mailer, Grass, Grossman, Garcia Marquez, Gibson, Knausgaard and more!
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 and most intense cases, to propose a wholly new idea of what constitutes an event or of the very experience of living. The most interesting contemporary novels are those which try – and sometimes succeed – in awakening our sense of a collectivity behind individual experience; opening up a relationship between the isolated subjectivity and class or community. But even if this happens (rarely!), one must go on to find traces of collective praxis hidden away within the mere awakening of a feeling of multitude. And, since it is in the sense of the nation and nationality that collectivity is most often expressed, it is urgent to disengage the possibilities of genuine action within these nationalisms. This sweeping collection of essays ranges from the elusive politicality of North American literature to the sometimes frozen narrative experiences of the eastern countries and the old Soviet Union; from East Germany to Japan, Latin America and the Nordic countries. Like any such voyage, it is an arbitrary movement across the world of historical situations which, however, seeks to dramatize their common kinship in late capitalism itself.
Reviews
Fredric Jameson is America's leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction.
Jameson has long been the most alluring American literary theorist, the only one to match the French in style and depth.
Not often in American writing since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force. The best of Jameson’s work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms.
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The most muscular of writers.
Times Literary Supplement -
Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today. It can truly be said that nothing cultural is alien to him.
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Jameson is probably the finest cultural critic in the world. There seems to be almost nothing he hasn't read, apart perhaps from the odd manual on pig-farming.
, London Review of Books -
The publications of Jameson’s articles and books are intellectual events, and he has that unique power to change the terms of the discussion. Theory, for Jameson, is not a way to distance himself from the text. Rather, it is theory that makes close textual interpretation possible, it is a mode of intellectual engagement that allows us to think about the dialectical relationship between the social, political and economic system and the text.
Times Literary Supplement -
No literary scholar today can match Jameson’s versatility, encyclopaedic erudition, imaginative brio or prodigious intellectual energy. In an age when literary criticism, like so much else, has suffered something of a downturn, with forlornly few outstanding figures in the field, Jameson looms like a holdover from a grander cultural epoch altogether, a refugee from the era of Shklovsky and Auerbach, Jakobson and Barthes, who is nonetheless absolutely contemporary.
, New Left Review -
Jameson thinks dialectically in the strong sense, in the way we are all supposed to think but almost no one does.
, London Review of Books -
Exploding like so many magnesium flares in the night sky, Fredric Jameson’s writings have lit up the shrouded landscape of the postmodern.