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Fredric Ruff Jameson (April 14, 1934 – September 22, 2024) was an American literary critic, philosopher and
Marxist Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflic ...
political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary
cultural Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...
trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include '' Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism'' (1991) and '' The Political Unconscious'' (1981). Jameson was the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of Romance Studies (French), and Director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University. In 2012, the Modern Language Association gave Jameson its sixth Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement.


Early life and works

Fredric Ruff Jameson was born in Cleveland,
Ohio Ohio ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Lake Erie to the north, Pennsylvania to the east, West Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Indiana to the ...
, on April 14, 1934. He was the only child of Frank S. Jameson (''c.''1890–?), a New York-born medical doctor with his own private practice, and Bernice ''née'' Ruff (''c.''1904–1966), a
Michigan Michigan ( ) is a peninsular U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, Upper Midwestern United States. It shares water and land boundaries with Minnesota to the northwest, Wisconsin to the west, ...
-born Barnard College graduate who did not work outside the family home. Both his parents had non-wage income over $50 in 1939 (about USD$1130 in 2024). By April 1935 he moved with his parents to Gloucester City, New Jersey, and by 1949 the family occupied a house in the nearby middle-class suburb of Haddon Heights, New Jersey. He graduated from Moorestown Friends School in 1950. He completed a BA '' summa cum laude'' in French at
Haverford College Haverford College ( ) is a private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Haverford, Pennsylvania, United States. It was founded as a men's college in 1833 by members of the Religious Society of Fr ...
, where he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society in his junior year. His professors at Haverford included Wayne Booth, to whom ''A Singular Modernity'' (2002) is dedicated. After graduation in 1954 he briefly traveled to Europe, studying at Aix-en-Provence, Munich, and
Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...
, where he learned of new developments in continental philosophy, including the rise of structuralism. He returned to America the following year to study at
Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...
under Erich Auerbach in pursuit of a PhD, which was awarded in 1959 for a dissertation on ''The Origins of Sartre's Style''.


Career summary

From 1959 to 1967 he taught French and Comparative Literature at
Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...
. He was employed by the University of California, San Diego from 1967 to 1976, where he worked alongside Herbert Marcuse. He taught classes on Marxist literary criticism, the
Frankfurt School The Frankfurt School is a school of thought in sociology and critical theory. It is associated with the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Institute for Social Research founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt am Main ...
, the French novel and
poetry Poetry (from the Greek language, Greek word ''poiesis'', "making") is a form of literature, literary art that uses aesthetics, aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meaning (linguistics), meanings in addition to, or in ...
, and Sartre. He was then hired by
Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...
through Paul de Man in 1976, and by the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1983. In 1985 he joined Duke University as Professor of Literature and Professor of Romance Studies. He established the literary studies program at Duke and held the William A. Lane Professorship of Comparative Literature, renamed in 2013, as Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professorship of Comparative Literature. In 1985 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.


Early works

Erich Auerbach would prove to be a lasting influence on Jameson's thought. This was already apparent in Jameson's doctoral dissertation, published in 1961 as ''Sartre: The Origins of a Style''. Auerbach's concerns were rooted in the German philological tradition; his works on the history of style analyzed literary form within
social history Social history, often called history from below, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians. Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, spreading f ...
. Jameson would follow in these steps, examining the articulation of poetry, history,
philology Philology () is the study of language in Oral tradition, oral and writing, written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also de ...
, and philosophy in the works of
Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary criticism, literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th ...
, who was the subject of his dissertation. Jameson's work focused on the relation between the style of Sartre's writings and the political and ethical positions of his existentialist philosophy. The occasional Marxian aspects of Sartre's work were glossed over in this book; Jameson would return to them in the following decade. Jameson's dissertation, though it drew on a long tradition of European cultural analysis, differed markedly from the prevailing trends of Anglo-American academia (which were empiricism and logical positivism in philosophy and
linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
, and New Critical formalism in
literary criticism A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's ...
). It nevertheless earned Jameson a position at
Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...
.


Research into Marxism

His interest in Sartre led Jameson to intense study of Marxist literary theory. Even though Karl Marx was becoming an important influence in American social science, partly through the influence of the many European intellectuals who had sought refuge from the Second World War in the United States, such as Theodor Adorno, the literary and critical work of the Western Marxists was still largely unknown in American academia in the late-1950s and early-1960s. Jameson's shift toward Marxism was also driven by his increasing political connection with the New Left and pacifist movements, as well as by the Cuban Revolution, which Jameson took as a sign that "Marxism was alive and well as a collective movement and a culturally productive force". His research focused on critical theory: thinkers of, and influenced by, the
Frankfurt School The Frankfurt School is a school of thought in sociology and critical theory. It is associated with the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Institute for Social Research founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt am Main ...
, such as Kenneth Burke, György Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser, and Sartre, who viewed cultural criticism as an integral feature of Marxist theory. In 1969, Jameson co-founded the Marxist Literary Group with a number of his graduate students at the University of California, San Diego. While the Orthodox Marxist view of ideology held that the cultural " superstructure" was completely determined by the economic "base", the Western Marxists critically analyzed culture as a historical and social phenomenon alongside economic production and distribution or political power relationships. They held that culture must be studied using the Hegelian concept of immanent critique: the theory that adequate description and criticism of a philosophical or cultural text must be carried out in the same terms that text itself employs, in order to develop its internal inconsistencies in a manner that allows intellectual advancement. Marx highlighted immanent critique in his early writings, derived from Hegel's development of a new form of dialectical thinking that would attempt, as Jameson comments, "to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps".


Narrative and history

History came to play an increasingly central role in Jameson's interpretation of both the reading (consumption) and writing (production) of literary texts. Jameson marked his full-fledged commitment to Hegelian- Marxist philosophy with the publication of ''The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act,'' the opening slogan of which is "always historicize" (1981). ''The Political Unconscious'' takes as its object not the literary text itself, but rather the interpretive frameworks by which it is now constructed. As Jonathan Culler has observed, ''The Political Unconscious'' emerged as an alternative method to interpret literary narratives. The book's argument emphasized history as the "ultimate horizon" of literary and cultural analysis. It borrowed notions from the structuralist tradition and from Raymond Williams's work in cultural studies, and joined them to a largely Marxist view of labor (whether blue-collar or intellectual) as the focal point of analysis. Jameson's readings exploited both the explicit formal and thematic choices of the writer and the unconscious framework guiding these. Artistic choices that were ordinarily viewed in purely aesthetic terms were recast in terms of historical literary practices and norms, in an attempt to develop a systematic inventory of the constraints they imposed on the artist as an individual creative subject. To further this meta-commentary, Jameson described the ''ideologeme'', or "the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes", the smallest legible residue of the real-life, ongoing struggles occurring between social classes. Jameson's establishment of history as the only pertinent factor in this analysis, which derived the categories governing artistic production from their historical framework, was paired with a bold theoretical claim. His book claimed to establish Marxian literary criticism, centered in the notion of an artistic mode of production, as the most all-inclusive and comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding literature. According to Vincent B. Leitch, the publication of ''The Political Unconscious'' "rendered Jameson the leading Marxist literary critic in America."


Analysis of postmodernism


Background

It is Jameson's contribution to a conception and analysis of ''postmodernism'' that has had the most impact in its breadth and reach. At the time of his death in 2024, it was generally recognized that he was the preeminent critic of postmodernism. Jameson's contention was that postmodernism is the cultural expression of our own current period of late capitalism. Postmodernism represents the form of an enormous cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style, rather than the production of goods. Jameson developed this form of analysis during a time when "an art-historical debate had wondered for several years whether our age had moved beyond modern art and on to 'postmodern' art". Jameson joined in on the debate in 1984 with his article titled "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" that was first published in the journal ''
New Left Review The ''New Left Review'' is a British bimonthly journal, established in 1960, which analyses international politics, the global economy, social theory, and cultural topics from a leftist perspective. History Background As part of the emergin ...
''. He later expanded the article into a book, which he published in 1991.


Jameson's argument

Jameson's argument centered around his assertion that the various phenomena of the postmodern had been, or could have been, understood successfully within a modernist framework. This differed from the most prominent views of the postmodern condition that existed at that time. In Jameson's view, postmodernity's merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated whole was the result of the colonization of the cultural sphere—which had retained at least partial autonomy during the prior modernist era—by a newly organized corporate capitalism. Following Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the culture industry, Jameson discussed this phenomenon in his critical discussion of architecture, film, narrative, and visual arts, as well as in his strictly philosophical work. For Jameson, postmodernism, as a form of mass-culture driven by capitalism, pervades every aspect of our daily lives.


Key concepts

Two of Jameson's best-known claims from ''Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism'' are that post-modernity is characterized by " pastiche" and a "crisis in historicity"."Modules on Jameson: On pastiche"
'Introductory Guide to Critical Theory.'' Purdue University. Accessed: September 28, 2024
And since postmodernism —as was mentioned above —represents the form of an enormous cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style, rather than the production of goods, Jameson argued that parody (which implies a moral judgment or a comparison with societal norms) was replaced by pastiche ( collage and other forms of juxtaposition without a normative grounding). Jameson recognized that
modernism Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...
frequently "quotes" from different cultures and historical periods, but he argues that postmodern cultural texts indiscriminately cannibalize these elements, erasing any sense of critical or historical distance, resulting in pure pastiche. Relatedly, Jameson argues that the postmodern era suffers from a crisis in historicity: "there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the ..history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current, multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life". Jameson's analysis of postmodernism attempts to view it as historically grounded; he therefore explicitly rejects any moralistic opposition to postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon. Instead, Jameson insists upon a Hegelian immanent critique that would "think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together".


Other concepts

Some of Jameson's other well-known concepts and philosophical contributions —not mentioned in the preceding section or tangential to his critique of postmodernism— include the concepts of "cognitive mapping" (adapted from Kevin A. Lynch; a form of class consciousness mediated by
popular culture Popular culture (also called pop culture or mass culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of cultural practice, practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as popular art f. pop artor mass art, sometimes contraste ...
that corresponds to the era of capitalist globalization), the " vanishing mediator", totality as conspiracy, "alternate modernity" (the
postcolonial Postcolonialism (also post-colonial theory) is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic consequences of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and extractivism, exploitation of colonized pe ...
notion of distinct regional pathways of capitalism, linked to the political project of BRICS), and antagonism as the principle of totalisation.


Later work

Several of Jameson's later works, along with ''Postmodernism'', are part of what he called both a "sequence" and "project" entitled ''The Poetics of Social Forms''. This project attempts, in Sara Danius's words, to "provide a general history of aesthetic forms, at the same time seeking to show how this history can be read in tandem with a history of social and economic formations". While the individual works are formally named on the flyleaf of ''Inventions of a Present'', its more nuanced structure—six volumes comprising seven publications grouped into three subdivisions—can be gleaned from mentions in the books themselves. ''Archaeologies of the Future'' is a study of utopia and
science fiction Science fiction (often shortened to sci-fi or abbreviated SF) is a genre of speculative fiction that deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts. These concepts may include information technology and robotics, biological manipulations, space ...
that was launched at Monash University in
Melbourne Melbourne ( , ; Boonwurrung language, Boonwurrung/ or ) is the List of Australian capital cities, capital and List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city of the States and territories of Australia, Australian state of Victori ...
,
Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...
. ''The Antinomies of Realism'' won the 2014 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Alongside this project, Jameson published three related studies of dialectical theory: ''Valences of the Dialectic'' (2009), which includes Jameson's critical responses to Slavoj Žižek, Gilles Deleuze, and other contemporary theorists; ''The Hegel Variations'' (2010), a commentary on Hegel's '' Phenomenology of Spirit''; and ''Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One'' (2011), an analysis of Marx's ''
Das Kapital ''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy'' (), also known as ''Capital'' or (), is the most significant work by Karl Marx and the cornerstone of Marxian economics, published in three volumes in 1867, 1885, and 1894. The culmination of his ...
''. An overview of Jameson's work, ''Fredric Jameson: Live Theory,'' by Ian Buchanan, was published in 2007.


Personal life and death

Jameson was married to Janet Jameson, and then to Susan Willis, and had two sons and five daughters in the two marriages. He died at his home in Killingworth, Connecticut, on September 22, 2024, at the age of 90.


Recognition, influence, and legacy


MLA awards and honors

The Modern Language Association (MLA) recognized Jameson throughout his career. In 1971, Jameson earned the MLA's William Riley Parker Prize. Twenty years later, it awarded him its 1991 James Russell Lowell Prize for ''Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism''. The latter has remained a landmark publication in its field since it was published in 1991, and is still Duke University Press's all-time bestseller (as of 2024). Jameson was again recognized by the MLA, this time in 2012, with its MLA Lifetime Achievement Award.


Holberg International Memorial Prize

In 2008, Jameson was awarded the annual Holberg International Memorial Prize in recognition of his career-long research "on the relation between social formations and cultural forms". The prize, which was worth (approximately $648,000), was presented to Jameson by Tora Aasland, Norwegian Minister of Education and Research, in
Bergen Bergen (, ) is a city and municipalities of Norway, municipality in Vestland county on the Western Norway, west coast of Norway. Bergen is the list of towns and cities in Norway, second-largest city in Norway after the capital Oslo. By May 20 ...
,
Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the archipelago of Svalbard also form part of the Kingdom of ...
, on November 26, 2008.


Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award

In 2009, Jameson was awarded the Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award by the North American Society for Utopian Studies. Jameson was given credit for his "significant role in introducing to an English reading audience the rich theorizations of Utopia found in German critical theory, in works written by Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and most significantly, Ernst Bloch." It was also noted that "the question of Utopia is central to all of Jameson's work."


Influence in China

Jameson has had an influence on the theorization of the postmodern in China. In mid-1985, shortly after the beginning of the cultural fever (early 1985 to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre)—a period in Chinese intellectual history characterized in part by intense interest in Western critical theory,
literary theory Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Culler 1997, p.1 Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, m ...
, and related disciplines—Jameson discussed the idea of postmodernism in China in lectures at Peking University and the newly founded Shenzhen University. Wang Ning. "The Mapping of Chinese Postmodernity." ''Postmodernism and China''. Ed. Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001 In 1987, Jameson published a book entitled ''Postmodernism and Cultural Theories.'' Although the Chinese intelligentsia's engagement with postmodernism would not begin in earnest until the nineties, ''Postmodernism and Cultural Theories'' was to become a keystone text in that engagement; as scholar Wang Ning writes, its influence on Chinese thinkers would be impossible to overestimate. This debate over postmodernism, in part fueled by Jameson, was at its most intense from 1994 to 1997, carried on by Chinese intellectuals both inside and outside the mainland; particularly important contributions came from Zhao Yiheng in London, Xu Ben in the United States, and Zhang Xudong, also in the United States, who had gone on to study under Jameson as a doctoral student at Duke.


Legacy

In 2011, Rey Chow, then chair of Duke University's literature program, reflected on Jameson's career on the occasion of presenting him with a lifetime achievement award: Robert T. Tally Jr.'s review for '' Jacobin'' of the 2024 work ''Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization'' described Jameson as: A memorial piece published by the editorial team of the Marxist journal ''Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory'' described Jameson as an "intellectual giant" responsible for an "enduring legacy that has inspired generations of thinkers, activists and scholars". They praised Jameson for his "militant commitment to a materialist reading of moments of struggle and revolt, utopia and liberation in cultural texts." Another memorial essay in '' The Nation'' observed that Jameson has emerged as a figure who "not only amassed one of the most impressive bodies of work within his field but who also was, fundamentally, someone who believed in criticism as a discourse, between teacher and pupil, between the work and the public".


Publications


Books

* * * * Reissued: Verso, 2008. * * ''Postmodernism and Cultural Theories'' (). Tr. Tang Xiaobing. Xi'an: Shaanxi Normal University Press. 1987. * (anthology) * (anthology) * ''Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature''. (with Terry Eagleton and Edward Said) Derry: Field Day, 1988. * * * , * * * Reissued: 2011. * Reissued: 2009. (anthology) * ''The Jameson Reader''. Ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell. 2000. * (anthology) * (semi-anthology) * * ''Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism''. Ed. Ian Buchanan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2007. * (anthology; altered one-volume re-edition, with additional essays) * * * * * * (with others) ''An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army''. Ed. Slavoj Žižek. London and New York: Verso. 2016. * ''Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality''. London and New York: Verso. 2016. * ''Allegory and Ideology''. London and New York: Verso. 2019. * ''The Benjamin Files''. London and New York: Verso. 2020. * ''Mimesis, Expression, Construction: Fredric Jameson's Seminar on Aesthetic Theory''. Ed. Octavian Esanu. London: Repeater. 2024 * ''Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization''. London and New York: Verso. 2024 * ''The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present''. Ed. Carson Welch. London and New York: Verso. 2024


Selected articles

* * * * (reprinted in ''Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11'', ed. Frank Lentricchia and Stanley Hauerwas, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 55–62) * * *


See also

* Dialectic * Dialectical materialism * Mark Fisher * Hegel * Late capitalism * Literary realism * Marxist theorists *
Literary theory Literary theory is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis. Culler 1997, p.1 Since the 19th century, literary scholarship includes literary theory and considerations of intellectual history, m ...
* Marx * Marxism *
Modernism Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...
* Political consciousness * Postmodernism * Psychoanalytic sociology * Utopia


Notes


References


Citations


Sources

* * * * * *


Further reading

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * (reprinted in T. Eagleton, ''Against the Grain: Selected Essays 1975–1985'', London: Verso, 1986, pp. 65–78). * * * * * Helmling, Stephen. ''The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique''. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2001. * Homer, Sean. ''Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism''. New York: Routledge. 1998. * Hullot-Kentor, Robert. "Suggested Reading: Jameson on Adorno". In ''Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno''. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 220–233. * Irr, Caren and Ian Buchanan, eds. ''On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization''. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2005. * Kellner, Douglas, ed. ''Jameson/Postmodernism/Critique''. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press. 1989. * Kellner, Douglas, and Sean Homer, eds. ''Fredric Jameson: a Critical Reader''. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. * Kunkel, Benjamin. "Into the Big Tent". ''London Review of Books'' 32.8 (April 22, 2010). 12–16. * * * Link, Alex. "The Mysteries of '' Postmodernism'', or, Fredric Jameson's Gothic Plots." ''Theorising the Gothic.'' Eds. Jerrold E. Hogle and Andrew Smith. Special issue of ''Gothic Studies'' 11.1 (2009): 70–85. * Millay, Thomas J. "Always Historicize! On Fredric Jameson, the Tea Party, and Theological Pragmatics."
The Other Journal
' 22 (2013). * * * * * * * * * * * * * (reprinted as ''Getting Out of History: Jameson's Redemption of Narrative'', in H. White, ''The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation'', Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 142–168) * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Jameson, Fredric 1934 births 2024 deaths 20th-century American essayists 20th-century American philosophers 21st-century American essayists 21st-century American philosophers American Marxists American anti-capitalists American critics of postmodernism American literary critics American political philosophers American philosophers of technology Anti-consumerists Connecticut socialists Critical theorists Duke University faculty Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Harvard University faculty Haverford College alumni Holberg Prize laureates Marxist theorists Moorestown Friends School alumni Ohio socialists People from Gloucester City, New Jersey People from Haddon Heights, New Jersey People from Killingworth, Connecticut Postmodern theory American science fiction critics University of California, San Diego faculty University of California, Santa Cruz faculty Utopian studies scholars Writers about globalization Writers from Cleveland Yale University alumni Yale University faculty