Jameson and Literature: The Novel, History, and Contemporary Reading Practices

Jameson
and Literature
The Novel, History,
and Contemporary Reading
Practices
Jarrad Cogle
Jameson and Literature
Jarrad Cogle
Jameson
and Literature
The Novel, History, and Contemporary Reading
Practices
Jarrad Cogle
Melbourne, Australia
ISBN 978-3-030-54823-0 ISBN 978-3-030-54824-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54824-7
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Contents
1 Historical Contradictions: The Career, Critical

Reception and Reading Practice of Fredric Jameson 1
Major Contributions: Marxism, Symptomatic Reading
and Postmodernism 4
Jameson’s Longue Durée: Minor Works and Contemporary
Approaches 16
Reading Jameson Reading the Novel 23
References 28
2 Jameson and Nineteenth-Century Realism: Generic

Boundaries, Historical Transformation and Affect
Theory 31
Realism, Marxism and the Canon 31
Jameson’s Nineteenth-Century Canon: French Realism
and Its Others 38
Realism and the Problem of Genre: Melodrama,
the Romance and Women’s Writing 48
Realism and the Nineteenth Century: Transformation
and Decoding 58
The Antinomies of Realism, Everyday Experience
and Narratives of Affect 65
References 76
v
vi CONTENTS
3 Jameson and the High-Modernist Novel: Absence,

Imperialism and Metacommentaries 79
Usefully Ambiguous Modernism 79
The Centre and the Periphery in Jameson’s High-Modernist
Canon 91
Metacommentary, Western Marxism and the Canonisation
of High Modernism 103
References 111
4 Jameson and Post-war Literature: Postmodernism,

Utopia and the Collective 115
High Literature in Postmodernity 117
Jameson and Genre Fiction: The Limits of Utopia 132
Jameson and Contemporary Cultural Material: Textual
Peripheries, Cognitive Maps and the Collective 145
References 156
5 Conclusion: Fredric Jameson, the Novel

and Contemporary Reading Practices 159
References 169
Index 171
CHAPTER 1
Historical Contradictions: The Career,

Critical Reception and Reading Practice
of Fredric Jameson
For decades now, scholars have described Fredric Jameson as one of the
world’s leading cultural theorists. Sean Homer and Douglas Kellner go
as far as to label him “the most important cultural critic writing today,
the world’s major exponent of Critical Theory and the theorist of post-
modernity” [1, p. xiii]. Despite the grand nature of this claim, it is a
difficult one to quarrel with. Two of Jameson’s books—Marxism and
Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971) and
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981)—
are landmark texts in the field of critical theory. Both made major
contributions to the revival of Marxist theory within scholarly practice,
particularly in the United States. The model for interpretation outlined
in The Political Unconscious is a project of rare proportions and has
become a primary example of the “symptomatic” reading practices that
developed in the humanities across the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore,
Jameson’s essays on postmodernity and postmodern cultural material
published in the 1980s—leading to the book Postmodernism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)—have become the standard
point of engagement for many enquiries into the period. These various
aspects of Jameson’s career have seen his work attain a significance seldom
matched in contemporary criticism.
At the same time, several factors offset this towering sense of Jameson’s
status. In several areas of study, such as affect theory and postcolonial
© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. Cogle, Jameson and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54824-7_1
2 J. COGLE
studies, critics have consistently written against his work. In this manner,
Jameson has often failed to infiltrate or shape the direction of academic
thought, despite his well-noted influence. More recently, scholars have
claimed that his major interventions within critical theory have come to
ossify interpretive practice in certain ways. For example, over the last
decade or so work on postmodern literature by Daniel Grausam, Amy
Hungerford and Timothy Parrish has frequently defined its methods in
contrast to Jamesonian types of analysis. Meanwhile, the sheer visibility
of Jameson’s most famous texts has tended to overshadow other facets of
his work. In books and essays that look closely at Jameson—such as Sean
Homer’s Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism (2004)
and Ian Buchanan’s Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (2006)—the focus often
remains on The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism, despite the wealth of material he has published
across his career. This is attributable in part to Jameson’s more recent
tendency to give his books a tighter focus: when compared to the bolder
declarations made in The Political Unconscious and elsewhere, his later
work has often had a narrower scope and intention. We should note,
however, that across these later texts, Jameson has continued to redefine
his oeuvre. While he only makes glancing references to the critical theory
that has emerged in the last two decades, Jameson often speaks indirectly
to earlier criticisms and subtly realigns itself with contemporary scholarly
practice.
Jameson’s theoretical frameworks continue to be much more influ-
ential and discussed than his readings of particular texts. For example,
his extended readings of Joseph Conrad’s novels—which take up almost
a quarter of The Political Unconscious —have not become foundational
in the same way that the book’s model for interpretation has. Perhaps
the most discussed of Jameson’s close readings are contained in his
seminal essay “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”
(1984), where he discusses the Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles and
paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Rene Magritte and Andy Warhol. In
this manner, it has often seemed correct to consider Jameson a cultural
studies figure, rather than a literary one. Sean Homer echoes several intro-
ductory passages when he mentions the “astonishing range of cultural
analyses” Jameson has produced, and the breadth of cultural material
he has discussed [2, p. 6]. Nevertheless, scholarly production has rarely
concerned itself with this aspect of his career in any sustained manner.
In monographs on Jameson, critics have often sought to consider the
1 HISTORICAL CONTRADICTIONS: THE CAREER … 3
impact of his work and contextualise his major theoretical interventions

within a wider sense of his career. Marxist scholars, such as Mathias Nilges
and Cornel West, have understandably focused on Jameson’s reinterpre-
tations of Hegel, Marx and Georg Lukács, at the expense of discussing a
sense of the literary [3, 4]. In sceptical readings of Jameson (which often
engage with his notions of totality and periodisation), critics have also
concentrated on his theoretical frameworks.
Nevertheless, several factors emphasise the central significance of liter-
ature to Jameson’s Marxist project. He trained primarily in French
literature, and he has worked almost entirely within literature depart-
ments throughout his long career. Even in his most theoretically focused
texts, such as Marxism and Form, he asserts a commitment to the field
of literary studies (see 5, p. xi). Within this framework, despite extensive
discussions of poetry, music, architecture and film, the novel has remained
primary in his reading practice. My work will contend that Jameson’s
idiosyncratic engagements with the literary canon—as well as his predilec-
tions and absences when discussing certain periods and forms—have an
impact on his theoretical frameworks, particularly in his sense of historical
change. If we make the concession that gaps are inevitable in any critical
practice, several aspects of Jameson project nonetheless bring these ques-
tions of canonisation and textual choice to the fore: the immensity of his
cultural knowledge and range of reference, his interest in generic bound-
aries and formulation, and his attempts to totalise and to make dialectic
connections between disparate texts. By closely attending to Jameson’s
literary readings, we also gain a new perspective on his overarching theo-
retical concepts, one that differs from many previous critical engagements.
Through this work, this book seeks to articulate the tension between
Jameson’s most influential work and the criticism that has surrounded
it, while suggesting ways in which his literary interpretation might remain
useful for contemporary reading practices. To recognise the specific nature
and extent of Jameson’s engagement with literary studies, in other words,
is not just to provide an account of his own literary criticism, but also to
offer an alternative viewpoint of his cultural work as a whole.
4 J. COGLE
Major Contributions: Marxism,

Symptomatic Reading and Postmodernism
Biographical information on Jameson is hard to come by. Books focusing
on his career have given only summary biographical details before concen-
trating on his theory and achievements. In the framing of his contribu-
tions to theory as paradigmatic or foundational, however, there is often
a restricted sense of Jameson’s connection to wider critical discourse. In
some ways, his own publications exacerbate this impression. His major
texts often engage specifically with an earlier generation of Marxist critics,
with only brief references to contemporary academic discussion. As Geof-
frey Galt Harpham notes: “Jameson’s works … seem to issue from a
center of consciousness unconnected with … any kind of neighborly
community. His first books appeared starkly without dedicatees, and, with
the exception of his very first, in which he thanked his dissertation advisor,
without the customary list of friends and colleagues and institutions who
made it all possible” [6, pp. 216–217]. The growing number of scholars
mentioning Jameson in their own dedications and acknowledgements
counteract this sense of the impersonal. Recently, former students have
described Jameson as “a great teacher” [7, p. xiii], or as a dissertation
advisor with a “voracious interest in everything, keen and attentive guid-
ance, and general good mood” [8, p. 249]. For the contemporary reader
without connections to the Program in Literature at Duke University,
however, Jameson’s position within academic communities and contexts
remains somewhat obscured. The summary of his career that follows will
aim to place his work amongst the changing academic landscapes in which
he has operated.
Jameson was born in Cleveland in 1934, and he attended Haver-
ford College, located just outside of Philadelphia, in the 1950s. He
has attributed his interest in continental philosophy and diverse cultural
materials to studying in the French department at this stage:
It was a time when—in the ‘50s—English departments were not reading

anything modern. At my college they didn’t even teach Joyce and Ulysses ;
in French departments we were reading all kinds of new stuff…. I think
what I was interested in was the link between literature and philosophy. For
me, Sartre was such an example—both a philosopher and literary writer.
That seemed to me a much more interesting way of putting together an
intellectual field of thought than literary specializations that focus mainly

on poetic texts. [9]
After this initial training, Jameson attended Yale, again working in the
French department. He would complete his PhD in 1959, with his disser-
tation concentrating on Jean-Paul Sartre. Jameson would revise the work,
publishing it as Sartre: The Origins of a Style in 1961. As Harpham notes,
the foreword thanks his dissertation advisor Henri Peyre. Scholars have
commented more often on a connection to Erich Auerbach, although
Jameson describes him simply as his “teacher” in an interview with Ian
Buchanan [10, p. 123]. In the same discussion, Jameson elaborates on
how he thought of his own work in relation to Auerbach, before his thor-
ough exploration of Marxist theory: “Instead of the New Criticism, I was
really formed in … philology, in both French and German; style studies
as it was called then, the work of people like Auerbach for example …
where the relationship of the original text … to movements and historical
contexts was a great deal closer … than the purely aesthetic apprecia-
tions of most English departments” [10, p. 123]. Origins of a Style is a
consideration of Sartre’s literary production, and Jameson sees his fiction
in terms of a modernist notion of style. In the text, Jameson claims,
“a modern style is somehow in itself intelligible, above and beyond the
limited meaning of the book written in it…. Such supplementary atten-
tion to style is itself a modern phenomenon: it has nothing to do with
the purely rhetorical standards of elegance and epithet-weighing which
dominated periods where all writers … owed allegiance to a single type of
style” [11, p. vii]. While the book has become an outlier in discussions of
Jameson’s career, predominantly due to the lack of a Marxist perspective,
the focus on the change from realism to modernism aligns with much
of his later work. In an afterword written in 1984 for its second edition,
Jameson fluidly reframes his earlier arguments within a more contempo-
rary sense of historical modes and critical theory. He claims the objective
of the book was to “replace Sartre in literary history itself” and proceeds
to tell the “story over again in what seems to me today a more satis-
factory terminology” [11, p. 205]. There has been some work by Sean
Homer and others that has pointed to ways in which the text remains
important to our understanding of Jameson’s later output. For Homer,
“it was precisely through the encounter with Sartre and the limitations
of existential phenomenology that Jameson came to Marxism rather than
through any break with Sartrean ideas as such” [12, p. 1].
6 J. COGLE
Over the next decade, Jameson would be employed at two major

North American universities, firstly Harvard and then the University of
California, San Diego. He would again work in French and compar-
ative literature departments throughout this period. While continental
philosophy had been a major influence on him up to this point, and he
had encountered the writing of Georg Lukács as early as 1956 it would
be at this stage that Jameson’s published work began to demonstrate
a thorough immersion in Western Marxist theory [see 13, pp. 75–76].
Within this time frame, he produced several articles that signified this
change of direction. These include “T. W. Adorno, or, Historical Tropes”
(1967), “Walter Benjamin, or Nostalgia” (1970), and “The Case for
Georg Lukács” (1970). After this run of essays, Jameson published three
highly prominent texts across the next three decades: Marxism and Form
(1971), The Political Unconscious (1981) and Postmodernism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). While he would generate a
wide range of material in essays, books and collections across this period,
critics have often summarised Jameson’s career and general influence by
looking at these three works in particular.
Marxism and Form is a thoroughgoing reappraisal of the work of
key Western Marxists. In the text, Jameson argues for the importance of
figures such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Lukács
and Sartre to the field of literary theory. Here, Jameson traces an intellec-
tual tradition largely ignored in the English-speaking world at the time of
its publication, particularly within the United States. He describes the
academic landscape at the time as such: “Marxist criticism has begun
to make its presence felt upon the English-language horizon. This is
what may be called … a relatively Hegelian kind of Marxism, which for
the German countries may be traced back to Lukács’ History and Class
Consciousness … while in France it may be … dated from the Hegel revival
there during the … thirties” [5, p. ix]. While at this stage of his career he
does not often reference New Criticism overtly, Jameson does reserve his
harshest criticism for certain aspects of US academic practice, particularly
“that mixture of political liberalism, empiricism, and logical positivism
which we know as Anglo-American philosophy…. The bankruptcy of
the liberal tradition is as plain on the philosophical level as it is on the
political” [5, p. x]. For Jameson this bankruptcy is based in “The anti-
speculative bias of that tradition, its emphasis on the individual fact or
item at the expense of the network of relationships in which that item
may be embedded” [5, p. x]. In Marxism and Form, Jameson points to
the increased attention that both English and North American universi-
ties were beginning to pay to French and German Marxist theorists of the
twentieth century. Nevertheless, he is quick to remind the reader of the
far more dominant tradition in North American academia, and he laments
the lack of translations of key texts by Bloch, Lukács and others. His inter-
vention is largely implicit, however, and he seldom mentions particular
North American critics or schools of thought by name. Additionally, his
survey of Western Marxists looks predominantly at work published before
the late 1950s, and thus Jameson effectively negates a developed sense of
contemporary engagement.
Marxism and Form frames itself as an introduction to the major
Western Marxists, but the text also serves as an outline for many of the key
concepts that Jameson would develop in his own theoretical project. One
of his chief critical imperatives—to “Always historicize!”—is already firmly
in place in this early work, and he uses historical perspectives to complicate
critiques of Marxism that were contemporary at the time. Thus, Hegel’s
system of totality and the contemporary sense of its impossibility are “not
proof of its intellectual limitations, its cumbersome methods and theo-
logical superstructure; on the contrary, it is a judgment on us and on the
moment of history in which we live, and in which a vision of the totality
of things is no longer possible” [5, p. 47]. It is here Jameson also begins
his ongoing reframing of Lukács. Jameson expounds on the various stages
of Lukács’ lengthy career, and he attempts to clarify numerous shifts in
perspective and terminology. In Marxism and Form, Jameson accepts
the validity of the various criticisms of Lukács, but also argues for the
importance and usefulness of his theory:
If … we set aside that part of Lukács’ work which constitutes a set of

recommendations to the artist … we find that his analysis of modernism
is based on a fundamental fact of modern art: namely, the observation
of … an absolute difference between that literature which is ours, and
which begun around the time of Baudelaire and Flaubert, and the classical
literature that preceded it…. The advantage of Lukács over sympathetic
theoreticians of the modern lies in the differentiating and profoundly
comparative thought mode which is his. He is not inside the modern
phenomenon. [5, pp. 198–199]
Jameson finishes the book by touching on some of the major theoret-

ical ideas he will develop in later works: a return to dialectical criticism,
8 J. COGLE
his Marxist vision of the postmodern and a model for interpretation that
seeks to uncover the politically repressed in terms of class struggles and
oppression.
Reviews of Marxism and Form reveal the singularity of Jameson’s
work in the US academy at this stage. Ehrhard Bahr calls it “the most
informative and lucid introduction to modern Marxist literary criticism
which … exists today in the English language” [14, p. 180]. He also
claims “no comparatist concerned with literary theory and criticism can
afford to overlook this work” [14, p. 182]. Paul Piccone and Heinz D.
Osterle similarly praised the originality of Jameson’s project in published
reviews, but critics such as Israel Gerver are more suggestive of the resis-
tance that Marxist theory faced in this period. Writing from a sociology
perspective, Gerver finds “the insistence on the validity and respectability
of Marxism as an intellectual mode is too shrill, and despite Jameson’s
sophistication, his is an ultimately unsatisfying formulation of the soci-
ology of literature” [15, p. 654]. In his conclusion, Gerver sceptically
claims, “Others may feel that the weightiness of the Marxian framework
lends significance to what most American sociologists regard as intel-
lectually marginal” [15, p. 654]. Still, Marxism and Form stands as a
ground-breaking text. Its publication signifies the beginning of an exten-
sive incorporation of Marxist theory within North American criticism over
the next three decades. The book raised Jameson’s profile substantially, in
conjunction with another seminal essay, “Metacommentary” (1971). The
article was published in PLMA, and—along with another contribution to
the journal, “La Cousine Bette and Allegorical Realism” (1971)—it went
on to win the William Riley Parker Prize of that year, awarded by the
Modern Language Association. Jameson would publish his next major
text, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism
and Russian Formalism (1972), soon after. With this body of work, he
quickly established himself as a significant voice in critical theory at the
time.
A decade later, The Political Unconscious would eclipse this early
success substantially. While Marxism and Form remains a key text for
dedicated Marxist scholars and readers of Jameson, The Political Uncon-
scious has had a wider impact on literary and cultural studies. With this
publication, Jameson moved beyond predominantly reframing the histor-
ical reception of major theorists—as seen in both Marxism and Form
and The Prison-House of Language—and began his own polemic work
in earnest. In The Political Unconscious , he argues for “the priority of the
political interpretation of literary texts” [16, p. 17]. He claims this inter-

vention takes place in an environment where it is “increasingly clear that
hermeneutic or interpretive activity has become one of the basic polemic
targets of contemporary post-structuralism in France” [16, p. 21]. In the
decade following Marxism and Form, the target of Jameson’s critique had
shifted, with New Criticism giving way to poststructuralist and psychoan-
alytic reading practices in North American universities. He argues against
the anti-interpretive tendencies found in the theory of Jacques Derrida
and Susan Sontag in particular, while also working to problematise texts
such as Roland Barthes’ S/ Z (1970). For Jameson, the historical, cultural
and political are inextricably linked. He claims cultural senses of the
signifier and signified are historically marked, and that Barthes’ perspec-
tive differs from that of the Balzac story he reads in S/ Z . As Jameson
argues in “Metacommentary”, critics must acknowledge these differing
historical positions. Furthermore, he states that no anti-interpretive act
can escape hermeneutics entirely: “The ideal of an immanent analysis
of a text, of a dismantling or deconstruction of its parts and a descrip-
tion of its functioning and malfunctioning amounts less to a wholesale
nullification of all interpretive activity than to a demand for the construc-
tion of some new and more adequate, immanent or antitranscendent
hermeneutic model” [16, p. 23]. With the extended opening chapter of
The Political Unconscious , Jameson attempts to provide such a model.
In doing so, he allows for the kind of “difference, flux, dissemination,
and heterogeneity” argued for by Gilles Deleuze or Derrida, but he
reasserts the importance of Marxist readings that speak to the social, polit-
ical and historical [16, p. 23]. To do this, Jameson labours to reframe
a number of Marxist concepts—such as mediation, totality, superstruc-
ture and mode of production—throughout the text. Importantly, he
concedes that history “is fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresenta-
tional” [16, p. 82]. He will seek to move beyond this particular impasse,
however, when he claims “history is inaccessible to us except in textual
form, or in other words, that it can be approached only by way of prior
(re)textualization” [16, p. 82]. For Jameson, the primacy of narrative in
conceptions of history and the world at large is not binding theoretically;
rather, it must be a consideration of any reading practice. Here, even as
Jameson aligns himself with a poststructuralist attention to difference, he
aims to subsume these theoretical standpoints into his Marxist project.
His goal is always explicitly to reassert the presence of class struggle,
10 J. COGLE
false ideology, reification and modes of production within these varying

frameworks.
For Jameson, while history remains a heterogeneous mass, it is also
the widest horizon to which interpretation and culture can speak. To
work towards this horizon, Jameson argues the critic must begin with
a structural analysis, borrowing from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ readings of
myth, but also invested in the Lacanian notion of the symbolic. From
there, the critic can locate the ideologeme, “the smallest intelligible unit
of the essentially antagonistic collective discourse of social classes” [16,
p. 76]. Jameson reframes Lévi-Strauss’ sense that “the purpose of myth
is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an
impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real)” [17,
p. 229]. In this regard, Jameson claims we can see the “symbolic act”
in terms of competing class interests and take textual readings to the
level of the social. Within this wider social purview, the critic is to see
the text as a singular ideological message operating amongst multitudi-
nous cultural discourses. Jameson then argues that interpretation may
subsequently move onto the level of the historical. He thus sees these
social forces in terms of modes of production as they evolve throughout
history, whether as residual, dominant or emergent—terms he borrows
from Raymond Williams. The remainder of The Political Unconscious
sees Jameson putting his model to work. In the second chapter, he
provides an overview of this method within the context of genre, looking
specifically at romantic and melodramatic literary forms. Across the next
three chapters, Jameson concentrates on a singular horizon, providing a
more developed sense of his reading method. Within this work he also
charts a historical progression, with each chapter focusing on a particular
author and a subsequent period of the nineteenth century. In this manner,
Jameson moves from Honoré de Balzac to George Gissing and then to
Joseph Conrad.
While the text engages with theorists such as Deleuze, Foucault and
Sontag it is telling that Jameson’s most lengthy theoretical engagements
are with Althusser’s chapter in Reading Capital (1965), Claude Levi-
Strauss’ Structural Anthropology (1958) and Nietzsche’s notion of ressen-
timent. Once again, Jameson’s interaction with theory acknowledges
a contemporary landscape, but looks to engage with earlier scholarly
production. As Terry Eagleton notes: “The Political Unconscious , despite
its dazzling range of allusion to contemporary thinkers … is far from a
fashionable book.… Jameson boldly emerges as … a shamelessly unre-

constructed Hegelian Marxist, for whom after all the Derridean dust has
settled … History and Class Consciousness remains the definitive text” [18,
p. 60]. In doing so, Eagleton perhaps understates the extent to which
The Political Unconscious reframes Hegel, Lukács and Marx. Jameson’s
commitment to older categories and ideas is a persistent tendency in his
work, however, and adds to Evan Watkins’ sense of Jameson emerging
“somehow already fashionably belated” [19, p. 17]. Despite this sense of
belatedness, the text was hugely influential. Even more so than Marxism
and Form, The Political Unconscious was responsible for the restora-
tion of Marxist theory as a powerful tool for cultural interpretation in
North American universities. The book was not without its dissenters:
despite Jameson’s careful work to frame notions of history, totality or
periodisation within poststructuralist frameworks, many scholars remained
sceptical of the text’s generalising and totalising tendencies. For example,
Philip Goldstein points to the problematic aspects of Jameson’s approach,
stating:
Preserving the autonomy of [literary, political and economic] levels

does not keep Jameson from affirming the transcendental status of his
conceptual terms as well as his interpretive “frameworks.” While the post-
structuralist denies that conceptual distinctions transcend the discursive
network in which they are formed and embedded, Jameson assumes that
theoretical terms like “class,” “value,” or “space” escape their disciplinary
contexts and acquire a “transcendent” status allowing them to characterize
a whole period or to determine political practices or social institutions. [20,
p. 264]
This hesitancy towards Jameson’s interpretive frameworks is a common

one and informs criticisms found in postmodernist theory, gender studies
and postcolonial criticism, amongst other areas of scholarly production.
The critique has persisted throughout Jameson’s career, as we will see
below, and the issue will be discussed further in the chapters to follow.
In the same period, Terry Eagleton would begin to write on Jameson,
articulating a particular set of enthusiasms and concerns in two essays that
remain highly referenced articles within discussions of Jameson’s work. In
“The Idealism of American Criticism” (1981), Eagleton claims Jameson’s
prose has an “intense libidinal charge, a burnished elegance and unruffled
poise, which allows him to sustain a rhetorical lucidity through the most
12 J. COGLE
tortuous, intractable materials” [18, pp. 14–15]. Similarly, in “Fredric

Jameson: The Politics of Style” (1982), Eagleton declares, “for me, it is
equally unimaginable that anyone could read Jameson’s own magisterial,
busily metaphorical sentences without profound pleasure, and indeed I
must acknowledge that I take a book of his from the shelf as often in place
of poetry or fiction as of literary theory” [21, pp. 14–15]. Along with
these kinds of assessment, however, Eagleton also frequently expresses
a reservation about the efficacy of Jameson’s political project. In “The
Idealism of American Criticism”, Eagleton famously states, “for the ques-
tion irresistibly raised for the Marxist reader of Jameson is simply this:
how is a Marxist-structuralist analysis of a minor novel of Balzac to help
shake the foundations of capitalism?” [18, p. 65]. Another of Jameson’s
contemporaries, Edward Said, adds to this discussion of political efficacy.
In “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community” (1982),
Said considers Jameson’s contribution to Marxist theory, the political
possibilities of academic work, as well as Eagleton’s “The Idealism of
American Criticism”. For Said, The Political Unconscious is “by any stan-
dard a major work of intellectual criticism”, but remains sceptical of its
Marxist project [22, p. 146]. Said argues that The Political Unconscious
contains an “unadmitted dichotomy between two kinds of ‘Politics’: (1)
the politics defined by political theory from Hegel to Louis Althusser and
Ernst Bloch; (2) the politics of struggle and power in the everyday world,
which in the United States at least has been won, so to speak, by Reagan”
[22, p. 147]. For Said, Jameson’s prioritising of political theory effectively
means he focuses on the synchronic and teleological over the local, which
Said doubts is tenable. Ultimately, Said asks, “how do quotidian politics
and the struggle for power enter into the hermeneutic, if not by simple
instruction from above or by passive osmosis?” [22, p. 147]. Alongside
the claims that Jameson’s work totalises in a problematic fashion, this
criticism of political efficacy has also remained a pertinent one across his
career.
In the years directly following The Political Unconscious , Jameson’s
fame would reach a certain apex as he began to focus on the burgeoning
field of postmodern studies. His intervention would take the form of
several lectures and articles on the postmodern, some of which he would
rework throughout the decade. Some of these smaller pieces would make
their way into his definitive statement of the period, Postmodernism, or,
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In these works, Jameson inter-
acts with the often-opposing views of early postmodern commentators,
such as Jean Baudrillard, Jurgen Habermas, Ihab Hassan, Charles Jencks

and Jean-François Lyotard. Many of these scholars, particularly Lyotard
and Baudrillard, draw from poststructuralist concepts, even as they aim to
describe new historical developments. As Jameson points out in his essay
“The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Debate” (1984), the
debates amongst these scholars had at times concentrated on the aesthetic
worth of postmodern cultural production—frequently in comparison with
works of high modernism. With this article and others, Jameson aimed
to shift the discussion. While he describes a familiar set of postmodern
sensibilities, often similar to Baudrillard and Lyotard’s depictions, he
also aims to tie these sensibilities to wider historical, economic and
cultural frameworks. These two facets of Jameson’s writings on postmod-
ernism delineate the differing receptions these articles have received. For
example, in “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”,
he discusses the
constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds

its prolongation both in contemporary “theory” and in a whole new
culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of
historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms
of our private temporality, whose “schizophrenic” structure (following
Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in
the more temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone—what
I will call “intensities”—which can be best grasped by a return to older
theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a
whole new technology, which itself is a figure for a whole new economic
world system. [23, p. 6]
In the essay, Jameson analyses a variety of cultural materials in terms

of the features discussed above, and he discusses a sense of historical,
spatial and temporal confusion for the Western postmodern subject. The
components that Jameson describes, along with a number of catchphrases
associated with this work—“the waning of affect”, “hyperspace”, “the
hysterical sublime” and others—remain the more widely quoted elements
of his essays on postmodernism. In this manner, his articles have become
a primary source for critics referencing certain postmodern sensibilities.
For another group of scholars, however, Jameson’s major contribution to
postmodern studies remains his work to connect these aesthetic qualities
to economic, social and historical change. In this regard, he reminds “the
14 J. COGLE
reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, post-
modern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole
new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the
world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is
blood, torture, death and terror” [23, p. 5]. The bulk of these essays focus
on postmodern temporal and spatial confusion, however, and how this
cultural situation is symptomatic of the obfuscation of global connections
in a multinational capitalist system.
Once again, we should note that Jameson’s work on postmodernism
has been the subject of ongoing criticism. The collection Postmod-
ernism/Jameson/Critique (1989) is a primary example, where questions
of periodisation dominate the reactions to his early essays on postmoder-
nity. As Douglas Kellner notes in his introduction:
It is interesting here and elsewhere to observe the ways that Jameson’s

effort to synthesize Marxism with poststructuralism and other competing
modes of thought are criticized by both sides. Generally, poststructuralists
and others claim that Jameson is guilty of excessively totalizing, subjec-
tivizing, historicizing and of utilizing humanist and reductive modes of
thought … while Marxist and other critics claim that Jameson goes too
far in in the direction of dissolving and fragmenting subjectivity and in
accepting postmodernism. [24, p. 39]
For example, in “Marxism and Resistance: Fredric Jameson and the

Moment of Postmodernism”, David S. Gross summarises the major theo-
retical debates that Jameson is engaging with at this stage of his career.
Predominantly discussing early postmodern essays such as “The Politics
of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate”, Gross
delineates Jameson’s relationship to the liberal pluralism of North Amer-
ican academia in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to poststructuralists in
the vein of Michel Foucault and Paul De Man. Gross focuses particularly
on Jameson’s attacks on varying kinds of anti-historicist interpretation in
both postmodern studies and poststructuralist theory. For Gross, this is
the major contribution of Jameson’s postmodern essays. In sketching out
the debates to which Jameson responds to, Gross also engages with the
controversial role of totality in his frameworks, stating that “the totalizing
practice in Jameson’s theory accommodates dialectically heterogeneity
and différance (i.e., the rifts, gaps and aporias disclosed by deconstruc-
tion), but not at the expense that ‘it’s all connected’” [25, p. 98]. In
this manner, Gross argues for the possibility of political agency within
Jameson’s theory. We might contrast Gross’ response with Mike Feather-
stone’s “Postmodernism, Cultural Change, and Social Practice” from the
same volume. In the essay, Featherstone is quick to remind the reader
that “approaches like those of Jameson tend to regard history as the
outcome of a particular relentless developmental logic and play down
the role played by classes, social movements and groups in creating the
preconditions for such a logic in their various power balances, interdepen-
dencies and struggles for hegemony” [26, p. 120]. Even as he recognises
the often-raised problem “faced by those such as Lyotard who formu-
late the postmodern as the end of narratives is that they too require
a metanarrative to explain the emergence of the postmodern”, Feath-
erstone remains committed to breaking Jameson’s larger categories into
contradictory components [26, p. 118].
Despite these criticisms, Jameson has remained committed to broader
interpretations of history and culture in order to argue for the necessity
of social change. Considering the type of interpretation recommended
in The Political Unconscious , however, his politicised understanding of
postmodern cultural production and social reality displays an increased
doubt about the possibility of praxis, or for removing oneself from the
cognitive dissonance created by late capitalism. This relationship between
Western cultural material and the newly developing phase of capitalism—
along with an associated alienation and reification—has come to define
another kind of response to Jameson’s work on the postmodern. For
example, Timothy Parrish describes a landscape in postmodern literary
studies, one populated with readings that “helplessly iterate and perpet-
ually enact Jameson’s concern that aesthetic creation and commodity
production have become the same thing” [27, p. 646]. For scholarly
production invested in postmodern cultural material, Jameson’s influential
descriptions of late capitalism are often stifling in their pervasive influ-
ence. Within cultural studies, critics discussing the “post-postmodern”
have found themselves in a similar position. Scholars such as Christian
Moraru, Brian McHale, Robert L. McLaughlin and Jeffrey T. Nealon
have remained thoroughly invested in Jameson’s portrayals of postmoder-
nity, despite aiming to come to new and productive understandings of
our current historical situation. The sense that a variety of scholars must
work out from under Jameson’s articles on postmodernism betrays the
enormous influence and visibility of his work in this area. Postmodernism
would go on to win the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern
16 J. COGLE
Language Association in 1991. The original “Postmodernism, or, the

Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” article remains a widely taught and
referenced text, even as the differing aspects of Jameson’s project remain
in an uneasy state of flux in this reception. It is, by now (to echo Homer
and Kellner) the paradigmatic piece of postmodern theory; it eclipses
the work by Lyotard and Baudrillard to which it responds. The extent
to which we can quantify this article’s contribution to the expansion of
cultural studies as a field is perhaps limited, in a way that Marxism and
Form’s impact on Marxist theory is not. Nevertheless, its totemic status
in this particular moment of critical theory certainly speaks to a sizable
influence across a number of areas of academia.
Jameson’s Longue Durée: Minor

Works and Contemporary Approaches
While these major texts are the most visible and significant moments in
Jameson’s career, this portrayal is complicated by the extensive period
he has worked over, the prolific output he has sustained throughout this
time, and the variety of cultural materials he has discussed. In publications
contemporaneous to his major texts, Jameson expresses a diverse set of
interests. This is evident in less-discussed books such as The Prison-House
of Language and Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist
as Fascist (1979), and in a broad range of more specialist articles. In
these more minor outputs, his focus ranges from Russian Formalism to
twentieth-century detective fiction, and he is also less concerned with
theoretical frameworks or grand statements. After the publication of Post-
modernism, Jameson remained largely interested in postmodernity for the
better part of a decade, but his publications in this period also involved
the reading of a variety of cultural materials, such as architecture, detective
narratives and peripheral global cinemas. As Jameson moved into the new
century, his work continued to diversify. He published Archaeologies of
the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005),
a lengthy consideration of science fiction in relation to utopian theory,
which also collected many of his early articles on the genre. Contempo-
raneously, he published two books on modernism: A Singular Modernity
(2002) and The Modernist Papers (2007), the latter also collecting a broad
range of earlier essays. From there, he would publish three texts focused
on more theoretical concerns. Valences of the Dialectic (2009), The Hegel
Variations (2010) and Representing Capital: A Commentary on Volume
One (2011) would consider, respectively, of the history of dialectical

theory, Hegel, and Marx. His interest in popular culture would also see
Jameson produce articles on the television programme The Wire (2002–
2008) and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), amongst
other topics.
This work has not had the same sort of dramatic effect on critical
theory and is of less concern for scholars commentating on Jameson. As
Alexander Dunst noted in 2008, the same year Jameson won the Holberg
Prize:
To this day, critiques of Jameson are overshadowed by his writings on

postmodernism leading up to the book of 1991. It can be taken as symp-
tomatic that the most recent book-length engagement with Jameson, Ian
Buchanan’s 2006 Fredric Jameson: Live Theory, essentially terminates its
discussion of Jameson’s conception of a postmodern present with that
volume, as do the introductions to the two essay collections on Jameson
to have appeared in this decade. [28, p. 106]
This tendency can be seen in monographs such as Sean Homer’s

Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism (1998) and
Adam Robert’s Fredric Jameson (2000), alongside Buchanan’s text. These
books are also typically sympathetic to their subject and often serve as an
introduction to Jameson’s more complex theoretical ideas. Commonly,
they see Jameson’s work as having a vast and largely positive influence,
and only briefly deal with the major criticisms found in his reception.
More recent monographs on Jameson, such as Robert T. Tally Jr.’s Fredric
Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (2014) and Philip E. Wegn-
er’s Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for
Narrative (2014), provide more thorough engagements with Jameson’s
later work, but remain in a similar mode. As such, these texts do not
often point to the somewhat incongruous nature of Jameson’s work,
remarked on by commentators such as Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Neil
Lazarus and Evan Watkins. For example, Watkins speaks to the monolithic
sense of Jameson’s arrival in the world of US academia (with the succes-
sive publications of Marxism and Form, The Prison-House of Language
and “Metacommentary” over a short period). At the same time, however,
Watkins paints Jameson as “somehow already fashionably belated, already
[an] immense and impressive monument at which subsequent genera-
tions of student tour groups would have to be detained…. His influence
18 J. COGLE
has been distanced rather than inaugural like that of Derrida or Foucault”
[19, p. 17]. Similarly, Lazarus claims Jameson’s “own interpretation of a
particular phenomenon or text or tendency, while being duly and dutifully
referenced in the subsequent scholarly literature, has never quite emerged
as the representative one, the institutional standard” [29, p. 42]. Indeed,
these opposing circumstances often mitigate Jameson’s imposing reputa-
tion. While postmodern studies, Marxist theory and literary studies more
broadly have seen him as a pivotal figure, this has not always been in a
positive manner. Despite the case for Jameson’s influence, rarely has his
work become integral to major academic fields such as feminist theory,
affect theory and postcolonial studies. Critics often cite his work in a
superficial fashion, and elements of his output have long been averse
to mainstream critical discourse. Furthermore, while scholars frequently
describe Jameson as an eminent figure, tied to important moments in
the history of critical theory, increasingly he is also seen as a distant but
overbearing figure that needs to be cast off.
Over the past decade a number of reading practices have asserted them-
selves in contrast to Jameson’s critical methodology. In 2012, Jed Esty
and Colleen Lye discussed “recent methodological changes one might
describe as a ‘new realist turn’ in criticism. Such a term would designate
a range of disparate projects that register the lapsing of the linguistic or
cultural turn that had once installed literary studies in the hub of interdis-
ciplinary influence” [30, p. 276]. Of the wide-ranging changes to critical
discourse that Esty and Lye denote, affect theory, surface or reparative
reading practices, recent postmodern literary criticism, and the “neo-
realist turn” in postcolonial studies have often sought to move away from
Jameson’s more famous contributions to scholarly production. In “Sur-
face Reading: An Introduction” (2009)—the leading essay in a special
issue of Representations, entitled “The Way We Read Now”—Stephen
Best and Sharon Marcus make one of the most visible and decisive breaks
from Jameson in this regard. In this work, Best and Marcus discuss
the multidisciplinary tendencies in the humanities over the past several
decades and claim: “One factor enabling exchanges between disciplines in
the 1970s and 1980s was the acceptance of psychoanalysis and Marxism
as metalanguages. It was not just any idea of interpretation that circu-
lated … but a specific type that took meaning to be hidden, repressed,
deep and in need of detection…. This ‘way’ of interpreting [was] ‘symp-
tomatic reading’” [31, p. 1]. For Best and Marcus, while symptomatic
reading has been a major component of critical interpretation for some
time, The Political Unconscious was instrumental in the development of a

variety of symptomatic reading practices:
The influence of Jameson’s version of symptomatic reading can be felt in

the centrality of two scholarly texts from the 1990s: Eve Kosofsky Sedg-
wick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1991), which crystallized the emergent
field of queer theory, and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: White-
ness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which set forth an agenda for
studying the structuring role of race in American literature. Both showed
that one could read a text’s silences, gaps, style, tone, and imagery as
symptoms of the queerness or race absent only apparently from its pages.
[31, p. 6]
In contrast, Best and Marcus claim that the contributors to their special
issue articulate “what alternatives to symptomatic reading currently shape
their work, and how those alternatives might pose new ways of reading”
[31, p. 3]. In a similar manner, Sedgwick equated Jameson’s interpretive
methods with a “hermeneutics of suspicion”, a term originally coined by
Paul Ricoeur. For Sedgwick:
In the context of recent U. S. critical theory … where Marx, Nietzsche and

Freud by themselves are taken as constituting a pretty sufficient genealogy
for the mainstream of New Historicist, deconstructive, feminist, queer, and
psychoanalytic criticism, to apply a hermeneutics of suspicion is, I believe,
widely understood as a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility
among other possibilities. [32, p. 125]1
Sedgwick also belonged to a group of affect theorists, including Lawrence

Grossberg, Brian Massumi and Sianne Ngai, who have frequently criti-
cised Jameson. As this new ambit of scholars has repurposed terminology
and theory relation to affect, they have often discussed Jameson’s famous
phrase used to describe postmodern subjectivity, that of the “waning
of affect”. This work only briefly engages with Jameson, however, and
does not often consider his broader discussions of affect found in
Postmodernism or elsewhere.
This common focus on either The Political Unconscious or Postmod-
ernism as a point of departure—and the tendency to see the influence
of Jameson’s work as restricting new scholarly production in certain
ways—is often at the expense of acknowledging how his later produc-
tion makes many shifts and amendments, or how it reframes many of
20 J. COGLE
his previous discussions. We should note that Jameson’s impersonal style

often obscures these subtle revisions of his more famous texts. The
glancing manner in which he references both contemporary theory and
direct criticism also contributes to this situation. Nevertheless, scholars
continue to ignore the importance of other interpretive methods to his
wider oeuvre. While critics working on Jameson in detail have long accen-
tuated the importance of dialectical thought to his interpretive practice,
briefer engagements such as those discussed above often diminish this
aspect of his work. A discussion of cognitive mapping is also absent in
these wider criticisms of Jameson, a component of his thought that has
developed significantly in the last two decades. In “Postmodernism, or,
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, he claims “The political form of
postmodernism … will have as its vocation the invention and projection of
a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as spatial scale” [23, p. 54].
For Jameson, space becomes the dominate problem of postmodernity—
as opposed to the high-modernist focus on problems of time—due to
the increasingly global and un-representable scale of multinational capi-
talist systems. Although he does not see an aesthetic practice of cognitive
mapping yet existing, elsewhere his readings of realism, detective fiction,
science fiction and certain cinematic examples offer parameters for this
kind of operation. As Jameson’s career has progressed, notions of cogni-
tive mapping have increasingly informed many of his readings of cultural
material—whether in spatial, historical or conceptual terms. As Robert
T. Tally Jr. has claimed, “although one might notice that Jameson never
quite wrote a full-scale study of cognitive mapping per se, and that he
tended to refrain from using the term itself as the Nineties wore on,
the concept or project remained a key aspect of his cultural criticism
during this period, and it has done so, arguably, throughout his entire
career” [33, p. 100]. This is especially evident in newer material that
reads contemporary literature and cinema in terms of an “aesthetic of
singularity” [34, p. 304].
Jameson’s most significant publication in the last decade, The Anti-
nomies of Realism (2013), works in this direction. Within the book,
he focuses on the nineteenth-century realist novel to a degree not seen
since The Political Unconscious , and he reads affect as an emergent cate-
gory within the literature of the period. While notions of affect appear
in several of his earlier essays, the text has an obvious relation to affect
theory, a highly discussed area of contemporary scholarly production.
Jameson claims, “I do not here mean to appropriate [affect] … nor do
I mean to endorse or to correct the philosophies of which it currently

constitutes a kind of signal or badge or group identity. Indeed, I want
to specify a very local and restricted practical use of the term” [34,
pp. 28–29]. Indeed, he only references theorists such as Sedgwick, Sylvan
Tompkins and Rei Terada in passing. Jameson instead concentrates on
the formal aspects of realism and describes a narrative whereby affect
comes to infiltrate a growing number of aspects of the realist novel. At
the same time, The Antinomies of Realism participates implicitly in the
affect theory discussion, especially when considering Jameson’s history
of oblique engagement with contemporary theory. Moreover, the text
makes other concessions to the changing landscape of literary studies.
Jameson reframes his sense of postmodern temporality by claiming “that
the contemporary or postmodern ‘perpetual present’ is better character-
ized as a ‘reduction to the body,’ inasmuch as the body is all that remains
in any tendential reduction of experience to the present as such” [34,
p. 28]. He also moves away from the symptomatic style of reading criti-
cised by Marcus, Sedgwick and others. The Antinomies of Realism is one
of Jameson’s least politically focused works, with the text’s interest in
historical development rarely concerned overtly with the political, para-
noid or symptomatic. His oblique engagement with affect theory, his
focus on realism and the reframing of his earlier terminology have given
this work a renewed prominence after a series of publications with more
specialised concerns. The Antinomies of Realism elicited special issues,
symposiums and roundtables in response to its publication, and a body
of work surrounding the text emerged in rapid fashion [see 35]. While
the reception of The Antinomies of Realism denotes an increased impact
in comparison with some of his other recent output, we can also see the
book as exposing a number of tendencies already present in his work over
the last decade—ones often ignored in the ongoing engagement with his
more influential early texts. The sense that Jameson’s career should be
re-evaluated, in a manner that pays attention to his wider body of work,
seems pertinent in the contemporary context, especially as scholars seek to
reassess or move away from his most famous contributions to interpretive
practice.
In order to better understand these varying shifts away from Jameson,
this book will consider critical reception of his work as it has developed
across his career. Despite the wide range of material that has focused
on Jameson, rarely have scholars provided a sustained account of the
criticism that surrounds him. As discussed above, many of the major
22 J. COGLE
books commenting on his career are sympathetic to their subject. Scep-

tical engagements often take the form of shorter essays and commonly
constitute more local discussions of Jameson’s theory. In contrast, I will
aim to provide an expanded account of Jameson’s position within critical
theory as it has developed over several decades and to consider the major
issues that scholars have raised in relation to his work. As discussed above,
questions surrounding the political efficacy of Jameson’s project are of
ongoing concern for a number of critics. The roles that notions of totality
and periodisation have played in Jameson’s theory also continue to be of
issue. Scholars have approached these concerns throughout the last three
decades in a fluctuating manner and have done so across several areas of
study. Here it is important to reiterate that, due to the length of his career,
thinking about Jameson’s work requires us to historicise. Within this time
frame, approaches to criticism and to canon formation have undergone
significant changes. These developments in scholarly production inform
contemporary discussions of Jameson’s most influential work, however,
as well as the material he continues to produce. My work aims to estab-
lish the importance of literature to our perception of Jameson, but also
to use this avenue of study in order to reassess his current position as
theorist and critic. Inevitably, this work will encounter many of the same
issues commonly discussed in relation to Jameson’s theory: questions of
totality, of political efficacy, of empiricism, of generalisation and of peri-
odisation. This literary focus will offer a new vantage point from which
to consider Jameson, however, and discuss his theoretical principles in
terms of his actual critical practice. This work will also accentuate a more
complex view of his career and how it has developed, particularly across
the last two decades. Here, we can connect Jameson’s work to a multi-
tude of reading strategies as they continue to proliferate in contemporary
criticism. This is in contrast to previous work that has sought to think
about his relationship to earlier titans of Marxist enquiry or the signifi-
cance of his theoretical interventions. For this book—even as Jameson’s
stature is inevitably related to pivotal and important major works—the
ongoing usefulness of his theory and interpretive methods will need to
be traced in more local areas of interaction.
Reading Jameson Reading the Novel

Across his work, Jameson closely relates notions of literary style, genre and
form to historical context. The interaction between mutations in cultural
material and underlying economic change is fundamental to his reading
practice and theoretical interventions. This book will organise its chapters
around the major categories of literary production that Jameson discusses
within three historical periods. These will include: the nineteenth century
and the realism that he most commonly considers, predominantly French
authors such as Balzac and Gustave Flaubert; the early twentieth century
and the high modernism that Jameson focuses on in this era, seen in typi-
cally difficult writers such as James Joyce, but also in more conventional
novels by E. M. Forster; the post-war period up until the present, where
Jameson has discussed developments in the postmodern high-art novel,
epitomised by the work of authors such as Pynchon and DeLillo, but
also a number of generic fictions, primarily science fiction and detective
novels. Each chapter will consider these literatures within the context of
Jameson’s larger output and evolving career, seeking to provide a detailed
representation of the subtly changing interests found across his remark-
ably cohesive body of work. As this concentration on period and specific
genres or forms suggests, his literary engagement, while often providing
close readings of texts, is predominantly interested in the development
of the novel as it relates to the expansion of capitalism in the Western
world. Authors who provide a highly particular formal example, one that
they foster and explore throughout their careers, but who also denote
a wider mutation in literary production, are often of particular interest
to Jameson. His close readings—while frequently illuminating and multi-
faceted—commonly seek to frame particular novels within an author’s
larger corpus and then extrapolate outwards to consider a literary form’s
wider functions and how these relate to wider developments in history.
My work will consider how such manoeuvres function within Jameson’s
larger theoretical discussions. It will also contrast these more dominant
literary categories with the cultural material against which Jameson defines
his choices, which he consequently discounts or omits. In this regard,
his constructions of varying genres—often through a discussion of what
a particular literary form is capable of performing—inevitably hinge on
notions of value. Here Jameson performs processes of canonisation and
exclusion, despite his many claims to be uninterested in literary worth.
These attributions of “possibility” influence his wider claims for the period
24 J. COGLE
and often combine a sense of literary value with a text’s potential for
“cognitive mapping” operations, while also limiting the reading prac-
tices surrounding certain genres. This book will also compare these larger
canonising gestures with Jameson’s casual comments about particular
literary examples. Increasingly, in his writing and in less formal interviews,
he makes numerous assessments of certain authors and novels. He often
deploys these judgments with an ironic flourish and only tangentially
relates them to his larger theoretical and political concerns.
The chapter on realism will look at one of Jameson’s primary aesthetic
concerns. The nineteenth century represents a particularly complex
moment in the process of modernisation that, for Jameson, begins in the
sixteenth century, and which he also refers to as the “bourgeois cultural
revolution”. Here, the development of capitalism and reification in Euro-
pean contexts—particularly that of France—are reflected in mutations in
the high realism that he favours. Jameson attributes a particular set of
historical tendencies to the nineteenth century in his frequent return to
considering the lineage of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola across this period.
We can closely link Jameson’s interest in these specific authors to the
influence the Western Marxists have had on his theoretical work. In this
regard, Lukács in particular has greatly affected Jameson’s engagement
with the nineteenth century, and the novels he has chosen to focus on.
Within this work, Jameson considers notions of affect, primitive accumu-
lation and subjectivity in relation to form. Often, he sees the increased
reification of the social realm—as well as the development of the bour-
geois subject—in terms of the changing forms and styles available to
each author. In this chapter, I will consider Jameson’s early material and
the French and comparative studies background from which his theo-
retical enquiries stem. I will then look closely at the historical, generic
and formal classifications made in The Political Unconscious . The text
focuses on European realism and the nineteenth-century romance, but
also sees Joseph Conrad’s “proto-modernism” in relation to the earlier
realist mode. Jameson explicates a fluid sense of how genres form and
interact across the text, yet, in other remarks, inscribes stricter boundaries
for the high realism he prefers. Here Jameson’s textual interests often
contrast with the scholarly landscape he has influenced, which has often
engaged with a more diversified sense of the century’s literature. In a
similar manner, the chapter will also consider Jameson’s treatment of liter-
ature as reflective of complex historical tendencies, and the difficulty of
manoeuvring between larger historical narratives and moments of speci-

ficity within this framework. The focus will then shift to The Antinomies
of Realism and the ways in which the text offers a new perspective on his
earlier sense of the century and the novel form. Within this discussion, I
will consider how Jameson’s notions of affect relate to specific examples
of affect theory in literary studies.
The second chapter will concentrate on Jameson’s treatment of high-
modernist literature. His work on this kind of cultural production is less
prominent in several ways and often less cohesive in terms of its focus.
Marxism and Form’s most concentrated readings of modernist cultural
material focus on Ernest Hemingway and the composer Arnold Schoen-
berg, for example, with Hemingway rarely figuring in Jameson’s later
portrayals of the period. Fables of Aggression purposely looks at the incon-
gruous and controversial modernist Wyndham Lewis, and it has become
one of Jameson’s least discussed books. Meanwhile, in influential texts
such as The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism, modernism serves
as a vanishing point for certain tendencies within both the nineteenth
century and late capitalism. In his later book, A Singular Modernity,
Jameson builds on the ambiguous nature of high modernism across his
project, and he discusses several factors that contribute to the impossibility
of defining the modernist period. Characteristically, however, he makes
many brief summations of high-modernist literature. In sweeping descrip-
tive passages found across the course of his career, he sees the changes in
high modernism as a reflection of increasing capitalist influence, but also
as a Utopian gesture in defiance of these larger structural progressions.
Working through this fragmentary engagement with high modernism,
I will consider Jameson’s common alignment of high modernism with
singular, difficult and central figures such as Joyce and Marcel Proust. The
chapter will also consider how literature relates to Jameson’s construction
of the period in terms of industrial and economic developments, partic-
ularly in relation to hiss notion of “Fordism”. These larger and more
restrictive descriptions of high modernism will be contrasted, however,
with instances where the period and style have operated as a complex
and heterogeneous site that refuses to be defined. Intriguingly, high
modernism is also the site of much of Jameson’s interest in nation, empire
and the postcolonial. The Modernist Papers , along with “Third-World
Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986), represents
some of his major considerations of peripheral cultural material. In A
Singular Modernity, he also considers the rise in discussions of global
26 J. COGLE
modernisms, although he argues against notions of alternate modernities

and predominantly concentrates on developments in Western academia.
The chapter will consider how Jameson’s work on high modernism
might reconcile with a range of scholarly production considering global
modernisms, “geomodernisms” or alternate modernities, but also ways
in which he has written against common criticisms of generalisation,
totalisation and imperialism levelled at his theory.
The chapter on post-war literature will look at Jameson’s depiction of
what he calls the “high-art novel” in the late capitalist period, as well as his
treatment of generic forms such as the detective novel and science fiction.
After spending the early stages of his career predominantly interested
in the resolutely highbrow, he comes to find the formal developments
as represented by Thomas Pynchon and E. L. Doctorow significantly
limited in comparison with high modernism. For Jameson, the period
is marked by an increasing reification of the literary field, and he finds the
utopian gestures of the high modernists becoming increasingly impossible
in postmodernity. Instead, he sees the literature as reflecting or even exac-
erbating the increased cognitive confusion of late capitalism. The chapter
will look particularly at the manner by which Jameson restricts the novels
of DeLillo, Doctorow and Pynchon conceptually. Jameson’s depictions of
high-postmodern literature often deny a capacity to represent the histor-
ical or to map late capitalist reality. The chapter will contrast Jameson’s
discussion of these novelists with his large body of work on science
fiction authors, predominantly ones writing in the post-war period, such
as Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin and Stanislaw Lem. Jameson sees this
kind of fiction as offering a rare opportunity to consider our historical
predicament in late capitalism. Similarly, he sees the novels of Raymond
Chandler as providing cognitive maps of contemporary urban environ-
ments comparable to those of certain high-realist works. This chapter will
concentrate on Jameson’s proclamation that the aesthetic value of post-
modern cultural material is unimportant, even as he attributes expanded
conceptual abilities to certain texts. In many ways, we can connect his
treatment of these varying literatures with an increased pessimism found
in his works of the 1980s and 1990s, with a somewhat dystopian view
of postmodernity being heavily applied to its literature. This pessimism
will be tempered somewhat with the publication of Archaeologies of the
Future. In the text, Jameson argues for a renewed commitment to envis-
aging the future, despite noting the difficulties of this operation. This
discussion will be augmented with a consideration of his more recent
work, which has begun to see more opportunity in contemporary fiction,

and to consider new representations of history and of global collectivity
in cultural material. In this regard, the chapter will close with a discus-
sion of Jameson’s current relationship with postcolonial studies, and how
contemporary work on cosmopolitan literatures and peripheral realisms
might reconcile with his later material.
The book will conclude by discussing the wider tendencies found in
Jameson’s novel reading practice across the previous chapters. In partic-
ular, this work will note the extent to which the novel form’s historical
development affects Jameson’s larger conception of capitalist expansion,
and how notions of formal possibility and his textual preferences have
shaped his wider cultural theory. This discussion will foreground the way
his work continues to shift, however, in both the elaborations of his more
recent material, and in current understandings of his critical reception.
The generation of academic heavyweights that preceded Jameson is now
replaced by a more obviously heterogeneous set of ambits populating the
fields of critical theory and literary studies. We can read his interpretive
practice as an intersection of these two moments in scholarly produc-
tion, and his personal sense of the canon—at times highly traditional and
restrictive, at other times inclusive and progressive—mirrors this aspect of
his career. In this manner, my work will present a unique view of Jameson,
one that sits alongside appraisals that place him more firmly within a
lineage of major Marxist theorists. At the same time, the conclusion will
consider whether the more recent efforts to criticise his work have prop-
erly engaged with Jameson, beyond this more conventional view of his
scholarly contributions. As Esty and Lye suggest, the move away from the
linguistic turn has seen literary studies’ position within a larger academic
landscape recede to some degree. As theorists move to consider affect,
the cognitive and the surface in more detail, Jameson’s complex engage-
ment with the literary may still offer opportunities for future production,
in ways that scholars are yet to acknowledge.
Note
1. We can see Sedgwick’s move away from queer symptomatic reading
over the course of her career towards “reparative” reading practices as a
precursor to this later development in scholarly production.
28 J. COGLE
References
1. Homer, Sean, and Douglas Kellner. “Introduction.” In Fredric Jameson: A
Critical Reader, edited by Sean Homer and Douglas Kellner, xii–xxii. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
2. Homer, Sean. Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism. New
York: Routledge, 1998.
3. Nilges, Mathias. “Marxism and Form Now.” Mediations 24, no. 2 (Spring
2009): 66–89. Accessed May 25, 2020. http://www.mediationsjournal.org/
articles/marxism-and-form-now.
4. West, Cornel. “Fredric Jameson’s Marxist Hermeneutics.” Boundary 2
11, no. 1/2 (Autumn 1982–Winter 1983): 177–200. https://doi.org/10.
2307/303025.
5. Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories
of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
6. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Late Jameson.” Review of The Seeds of Time, by
Fredric Jameson. Salmagundi, no. 111 (Summer 1996): 213–232. Accessed
May 23, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40536009.
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Desire for Narrative. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014.
8. Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping. Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008.
9. Jameson, Fredric. “A Conversation with Fredric Jameson.” By Brian
Contratto. The Chronicle: The Daily Independent at Duke University,
February 8, 2012. Accessed May 25, 2020. https://www.dukechronicle.
com/article/2012/02/conversation-fredric-jameson.
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11. Jameson, Fredric. Sartre: The Origins of a Style. New York: Columbia
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12. Homer, Sean. “Sartrean Origins.” In Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader,
edited by Sean Homer and Douglas Kellner, 1–21. New York: Palgrave
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75–94. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
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org/stable/40246163.
15. Gerver, Israel. Review of Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical
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6 (November 1973): 653–654. Accessed May 23, 2020. www.jstor.org/sta
ble/2062485.
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Act. London: Methuen, 1981.
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3 (1982): 14–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/464940.
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Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
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of Postmodernism.” In Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas
Kellner, 96–116. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989.
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3898/newf.65.07.2008.
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33. Tally Jr., Robert T. Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism.
London: Pluto Press, 2014.
34. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013.
35. Bennett, Bridget, Rachel Bowlby, Andrew Lawson, Mark Storey, Graham
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Journal of American Studies 48, no. 4 (2014): 1069–1086. https://doi.
org/10.1017/S0021875814001376.
CHAPTER 2
Jameson and Nineteenth-Century Realism:

Generic Boundaries, Historical
Transformation and Affect Theory
Realism, Marxism and the Canon

In discussions of Jameson’s work, critics have frequently cited Terry
Eagleton. His early question in particular—“how is a Marxist-structuralist
analysis of a minor novel of Balzac to help shake the foundations of capi-
talism?”—appears regularly in essays and books [1, p. 65]. The passage
often serves to suggest a more general hesitancy towards Jameson’s polit-
ical project, one that has persisted throughout his career [see 2, 3,
4]. While this particular exchange continues to shape our perception
of Jameson, his explicit reply to Eagleton remains less discussed. In an
interview published in the same period, Jameson claims:
Balzac, of all writers, has a privileged and symbolic position in the tradi-
tional debates of Marxist aesthetics: so that to propose a new reading of
Balzac is to modify those debates.… So one type of political consequence
that emerges from work like this can be located within Marxism.…
On another level, however, such studies of “classical” texts are to be
taken … as an intervention in the standard university teaching of what is
called the “canon.” So at this point the question opens up into the more
general problem of Marxist pedagogy. [5, p. 72]
In The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson limits his political intent,

deferring “that exploratory projection of what a vital and emergent
political culture should be and do which Raymond Williams has rightly

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54824-7_2
32 J. COGLE
proposed as the most urgent task of a Marxist cultural criticism” [6,

p. 10]. The response to Eagleton, however, reinforces the political
valences of Jameson’s literary interpretations, along with the importance
of realism to the Marxist theory that he inherits. He also emphasises the
significance of the canon to his engagement with a wider field of literary
studies. While the academic landscape has altered significantly throughout
his career, it often seems that his view of the nineteenth century in partic-
ular has remained attached to “what [was] called the ‘canon’” during his
early training. This training, predominantly within French and compara-
tive departments in the 1950s, leaves him with a different set of interest
than that of more recent literary theory. In this manner, Jameson’s sense
of nineteenth-century literature reflects his contradictory position within
contemporary scholarship. The work influenced by The Political Uncon-
scious greatly restructured a sense of what the canon might include.
Jameson’s portrayals of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, focus
on a more restricted group of realist novels, in particular a French lineage
that connects Honoré de Balzac with Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola.
This sense of nineteenth-century literature is especially evident in
Jameson’s earliest texts. As later chapters will discuss, his modernist
and postmodernist interests remain in flux throughout the 1970s and
1980s. In contrast, he firmly establishes his realist interests from Marxism
and Form (1971) onwards. Throughout the text, he regularly mentions
Balzac, Flaubert and Leo Tolstoy. At this early stage of his career, Jameson
predominantly aligns himself with Lukács’ sense of the historical develop-
ment of the novel, and realism’s ability to map class structure or social
totalities. He maintains a mediatory position throughout, however, and
he complicates Lukács’ attribution of worth within the realist canon. For
example, Jameson places Zola—along with high modernism—amidst a
larger context of historical development: “It was Balzac’s historical luck
to have witnessed, not the later, fully evolved and finished capitalism of
Flaubert and Zola, but the very beginnings of capitalism in France; to
have been contemporary with a social transformation … to have been
able to apprehend social change as a network of individual stories” [7,
p. 203]. While Jameson often refers to specific realist authors in these
early texts, his primary focus is on theory and interpretation. In Marxism
and Form, his discussions of realism take place predominantly in the
context of Western Marxist theory. For example, he positions varying
realist forms in parallel with Adorno’s readings of compositional music. In
this fashion, Jameson compares Tolstoy’s historical position with that of
2 JAMESON AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY REALISM … 33
Beethoven’s, and the formal qualities of the violin concerto with those of
the bildungsroman. While the book provides a number of close readings,
particularly of Ernest Hemingway, Jameson’s primary goal is to argue for
the importance of figures such as Adorno and Lukács. In this manner,
these theorists’ interests and their notions of literary aesthetics heavily
influence Jameson’s early discussions of literature.
A year later, in The Prison-House of Language (1972), Jameson shifted
his focus to Russian formalism and French structuralism, as the latter
moved into a position of importance in the North American academy.
For Jameson, the aim of the book was to “clarify the relationships possible
between the synchronic methods of Saussurean linguistics and the reali-
ties of time and history itself. Nowhere has such a relationship proved
more paradoxical than in that realm of literary analysis in which the most
tangible and lasting achievements of Formalism and Structuralism have
been made” [8, p. x]. Of all Jameson’s early works, this book is the
most hermetically concerned with theory. Yet, he remains interested in the
disparities of the novelistic form in relation to the theories of the folk tale,
short story and classical epic found in Vladimir Propp, Viktor Shklovsky
and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Here, Jameson argues that the diachronic qual-
ities of the novel resist certain synchronic structuralist analyses of other
forms. He claims:
Law depends in some sense upon synchrony; and we have seen how short
stories or folk-tales have a kind of atemporal and object-like unity.… This
is to say that where we can easily identify the non-story, that which fails to
correspond to the intrinsic laws of the story as a form … the novel has no
opposite in this sense, for it is not a genre like tragedy or comedy, like lyric
or epic … and the novels which do exist in the world are not exemplars
of some universal, but are related to each other according to a historical
rather than a logical and analytical mode. [8, pp. 73–74]
The novelists that commonly appear throughout The Prison-House

of Language remain figures such as Flaubert and Tolstoy, although
an extended discussion of Dickens provides a rare early insight into
Jameson’s sense of nineteenth-century English literature. As I will discuss
in further detail below, Jameson reads Dickens’ Hard Times “not only
because it is familiar and relatively short, but also and primarily because,
as Dickens’ only didactic or ‘thesis’ novel, it involves an idea which has
34 J. COGLE
already been formulated for us by the author in terms of a binary opposi-

tion” [8, p. 167]. In this manner, Jameson’s discussion of Dickens places
the author within a structuralist and synchronic framework of interpre-
tation, one that limits Dickens’ novels in comparison with those of the
French realists.
Coming almost a decade after The Prison-House of Language, The
Political Unconscious marks the culmination of Jameson’s early interest
in realism. The book would provide his most intensive engagement with
the nineteenth-century novel up to that point. Four chapters concentrate
respectively on the romance novel of the nineteenth century, Balzac’s
early high realism, George Gissing’s English naturalism, and Joseph
Conrad—who, for Jameson, straddles late nineteenth-century forms and
early modernist ones. As in his previous texts, Jameson’s discussion here
is more theoretical in its intention. He poses his extended readings of the
three literary figures as testing grounds for the interpretive method that
he formulates in the opening chapter. In this manner, he argues against
analysis looking primarily at modes of production that “tend toward a
purely typological or classificatory operation, in which we are called upon
to ‘decide’ such issues as whether Milton is to be read within a ‘precapital-
ist’ or a nascent capitalist context, and so forth” [6, p. 93]. In relation to
his readings on Conrad, he argues that it would “be possible to posit some
static homology … between the three levels of social reification, stylistic
invention, and narrative or diegetic categories; but it seems more inter-
esting to grasp the mutual relationships between these three dimensions
of the text and its social subtext in the more active terms of produc-
tion, projection … displacement and the like” [6, p. 44]. In this manner,
Jameson argues for a less synchronic understanding of historical devel-
opment, one that sees varying tensions in cultural material as reflective
of a complex and fraught interaction between dominant, persistent and
emergent historical tendencies. He argues for a heterogeneous model of
history that acknowledges poststructuralist problems with metanarratives,
and he works throughout the text to mediate between larger historical
movements and the more specific and complex readings he performs in
regard to specific novels. Nevertheless, in the reception of The Political
Unconscious , certain prevailing criticisms of Jameson’s project begin to
take form. Questions surrounding the totalising and periodising aspects of
the book, in particular, arose in regard to the larger historical frameworks
Jameson denotes [see 9, 10, 11].
After publishing The Political Unconscious , Jameson focused heavily

on postmodernity for well over a decade. In this time, he would continue
to produce essays on modernist literature and science fiction, amongst
other literary forms, but he produced very little material focused on clas-
sical realism. Nevertheless, the French figures of Balzac, Flaubert and
Zola would remain common reference points for Jameson throughout
the period. Over three decades after The Political Unconscious , The
Antinomies of Realism (2013) stands as a late return to the nineteenth-
century realist novel for Jameson. Furthermore, the book is perhaps his
most committed theoretical investigation of a literary genre—with wider
notions of class, politics and reification relegated to the background.
Jameson splits the work into two parts, the first constituting a sustained
argument over the course of several chapters, and the second comprised of
three longer chapters, which are predominantly self-contained. The over-
arching argument of the opening section sees classical or high realism as a
tension between two narrative modes. The first narrative mode is one of
an earlier storytelling tradition: folk tales, myth or the novel of the eigh-
teenth century. Throughout, he uses the term “récit ” to describe this
kind of narrative, which primarily focuses on plot and whose emotional
content remains the larger categories of love, hate, happiness and so on.
The second narrative mode is one more closely aligned with scene and
description, and it is here that “affect” enters the literary for Jameson.
Although he does not discuss modernism in detail in the book, the period
can be seen as the moment where this narrative tendency has thoroughly
replaced plot in terms of importance, as seen in his preferred example
of high modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In The Antinomies of
Realism, Jameson discusses high realism as a tension between these two
types of modes and reads the form as containing elements of both. For
Jameson, this is why high realism is never a fixed form and has proven
difficult to categorise. He sees varying kinds of realist novel as providing a
series of formal solutions that are able to incorporate this kind of tension.
He describes a situation in the nineteenth century where “the repertory
of récits … is no longer so attractive in the longer … narrative forms,
where the experience of the everyday has begun to assert its claims on
… our attentions. The nineteenth century, indeed, may be characterised
as the era of the triumph of everyday life, and of the hegemony of its
categories everywhere, over … ‘extreme situations’” [12, p. 109]. It is in
36 J. COGLE
this context that affect emerges in literature and begins to alter the narra-
tive temporality that Jameson calls “irrevocable time, of the event that has
happened once and for all”, which is found in the récit [12, p. 21].
In the opening chapters of The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson again
returns to discussing his preferred French realists, along with Tolstoy,
but introduces a series of new major concerns. In this manner, George
Eliot occupies a central position within the text, despite Jameson rarely
mentioning her in his previous work. Eliot is the focus of issues relating to
style indirect libre, providence and temporality, as well as serving as a prob-
lematic for his concepts relating to melodrama and nineteenth-century
morality. Jameson sees Eliot’s invention of characters that function within
the plot as villains—but are relatable and somewhat sympathetic figures—
as one of the major developments in high realism’s move away from
an earlier storytelling tradition. The second part of The Antinomies of
Realism focuses on three varied topics. Jameson discusses representations
of war in relation to generic forms of war narratives. He uses examples
dating from the seventeenth century up until Alexander Kluge’s Chronik
der Gefuhle (2004). Jameson also investigates the notion of providence
in the realist novel across one of these chapters. George Eliot serves as
the focus once again, with Jameson reading her novels in terms of inher-
ited literary forms and their transformation in new historical contexts. In
concentrating on The Antinomies of Realism and the essays that surround
it, we can see an emergence late in Jameson’s career of a more nuanced
depiction of realism. For instance, the text often provides literary readings
that are more observant of the sense of heterogeneity and contradiction
that he describes in The Political Unconscious , in comparison with some of
his earlier material. At the same time, he also moves away from the symp-
tomatic or paranoid reading practices that scholars have more recently
criticised. The wider sense of the realist literature discussed within the text
also demonstrates the extent to which his notions of nineteenth-century
realism have moved away from mediating between differing Marxist and
poststructuralist positions and begun to embrace a more varied sense of
the formal qualities of the nineteenth-century novel. In his introduction
to the book, Jameson surveys a series of engagements with the realist
novel, notably discussing Mikhail Bakhtin, Lukács, and Ian Watt, amongst
others. He goes on to claim: “Realism … is a hybrid concept, in which
an epistemological claim (for knowledge or truth) masquerades as an
aesthetic ideal.… If it is social truth … we want from realism, we will
soon find that what we get is ideology.… If it is history we are looking
for then we are at once confronted with questions about the uses of the
past and even access to it” [12, pp. 5–6]. In The Antinomies of Realism,
Jameson’s dialectical reading practice comes to the fore, concentrating on
the novel as a form situated within a complex host of cultural contexts.
His work moves beyond the more structured accounts of realism found
in Lukács in particular and remains more sceptical of realism’s ability to
map the social in general.
The following sections of this chapter will look at this develop-
ment in Jameson’s career, using four distinct frameworks. Firstly, I will
concentrate on the various canonising gestures Jameson performs in his
engagement with nineteenth-century literature. His concentration on
developments in the French realist novel frames the work of Balzac,
Flaubert and Zola as paradigmatic examples, which, when placed in rela-
tion to each other, chart larger mutations in the novel form. In this work,
Jameson diminishes the importance of the English novel in the nineteenth
century in particular, often positioning the novels of Charles Dickens
and George Gissing as followers of a more advanced French lineage.
Secondly, and following on from this work, I will consider Jameson’s
sense of nineteenth-century genre. While he commonly discusses a fluid
notion of genre as an “ad hoc” construct—particularly in The Political
Unconscious —his early work often seeks to demarcate strict boundaries in
relation to realism. He frequently works to contrast realist formal quali-
ties with that of the romance or melodrama, and in doing so constructs a
number of generic boundaries. Within this discussion of genre, notions of
gender will become prominent, particularly in regard to his work on the
domestic novel. Jameson’s ambivalence towards the nineteenth-century
English novel—and texts that are closer in form to the romance—result
in a view of the period very much at odds with contemporary scholarship.
For example, Jameson often concentrates on Flaubert in any discussion
of the representation of women in nineteenth-century literature [see 12,
pp. 147–148]. The Antinomies of Realism provides a corrective to some
of these tendencies, although Jameson’s aversion to notions of identity
politics produces a continuing tension in his discussions of novels focused
on women’s experience. Thirdly, I will concentrate on notions of histor-
ical development. For Jameson, the Marxist symptomatic reading should
discuss the complex developments of cultural tendencies and modes of
production. Nevertheless, his larger historical narratives of the nineteenth
century and its literature are often interested in far more linear and
sweeping senses of development. While theorists have often attacked the
38 J. COGLE
concept of totality on poststructuralist terms, Jameson’s treatment of the

nineteenth century suggests an incongruity inherent in his own rubric of
interpretation. The chapter will explore how Jameson’s readings, which
pay attention to multifaceted historical tensions and contradictions, are
to be reconciled with the more straightforward historical narratives that
he discusses at other moments. Finally, I will discuss The Antinomies of
Realism in relation to affect theory. While we might see Jameson’s appro-
priation of the term as opportunistically timed, in a manner similar to
his other major critical interventions, this chapter will conclude with an
extended consideration of his history of using the term, particularly in
relation to realism. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the discussion of realism
and affect found in The Antinomies of Realism contributes to continued
modifications to Jameson’s sense of cultural forms and their relationship
to the political. Despite working to distance his text from other contem-
porary examples of affect theory, it remains that Jameson’s newer material
has certain affinities with critics such as Jonathan Flatley and Sianne Ngai,
particularly in relation to theories of collectivity and the everyday. In this
regard, Jameson’s work on realism has the potential to take on new polit-
ical valences, in a fashion that might provide a more visible answer to
Eagleton’s early queries.
Jameson’s Nineteenth-Century Canon:

French Realism and Its Others
In his early career, Jameson often discusses the vast transformation of the
Western world throughout the nineteenth century. He commonly depicts
major alterations to the function of economics, subjectivity and culture
across the period. For Jameson, the primary witness to this historical
change is the novel, and he often works to relate its formal developments
to wider historical or cultural contexts. He describes a process in The
Political Unconscious , whereby broader readings of genre can ultimately
“be transformed into the detection of a host of generic messages—some
of them objectified survivals from older modes of cultural produc-
tion, some anticipatory, but all together projecting a formal conjuncture
through which the ‘conjuncture’ of coexisting modes of production at
a given historical moment can be detected and allegorically articulated”
[6, p. 99]. Within this rubric, texts perform a variety of functions. For
example, Balzac’s novels express political desire, whereas Flaubert’s work
describes the appearance of a bourgeois “affect” in reified domestic space.
Yet, despite Jameson’s immense and varied proclamations for the period,
his sense of its literature is noticeably restricted. The realist novel is
commonly the only kind of nineteenth-century literature that he engages
with at length, and his sense of the genre is decidedly limited. In partic-
ular, we can trace specific boundaries in his work in relation to both
generic categorisation and national variations.
Western Marxist theory influences Jameson’s engagement with the
realist canon, along with his early training in French and comparative
literature departments. While he references a small variety of realists,
such as Tolstoy or Dickens, his focus inarguably remains on certain
French authors. Beyond the strict focus on French realism, Jameson has
consistently criticised the English tradition and has seldom worked on
nineteenth-century American authors. He rarely mentions certain pivotal
nineteenth-century figures, despite the proliferation of stray references
across Jameson’s body of work. For example, his early texts do not
comment on widely discussed authors such as Jane Austen, Herman
Melville or George Eliot. Jameson predominantly excludes texts that we
might conventionally define as romances or melodramas in particular.
He has also seldom engaged with more specific generic forms found in
the nineteenth century, such as the gothic tale or adventure novel. It
should be noted that across Jameson’s career the category of realism is
an important, overarching concept. Drawn from his engagement with
Western Marxism, the notion of realism impacts on his understanding
of cultural forms across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As many
commentators have noted, Jameson’s work is remarkable in its consis-
tency, its elaboration on key themes, and the recurring sense that—despite
the breadth of material he covers—all aspects of his theoretical project
are connected. Nevertheless, two major elements of Jameson’s theory
actively work against the strict categorisation of the realist novel often
found in his texts—as well as a sense that Jameson’s notion of realism has
remained a constant, well-defined concept in his oeuvre. Firstly, he posi-
tions the realist novel as a hybrid literary mode. For Jameson, the realist
novel borrows from a number of earlier narrative forms and these forms
remain latent in the novel’s generic makeup. He repeats this notion on
a number of occasions, particularly in The Political Unconscious and The
Antinomies of Realism. As both texts demonstrate, the novel as a form
and realism as a genre are in constant flux throughout the nineteenth
century. Nevertheless, Jameson attempts to see his paradigmatic French
40 J. COGLE
writers in closed realist terms, in a manner that contradicts his descrip-

tions of generic boundaries as fluid or “ad hoc”. Secondly, Jameson has
consistently attacked what he calls ethical criticism across his career. He
has often symptomatically read the ethical and ideological motives behind
theoretical frameworks, whereby “even the most innocently formalizing
readings of the New Criticism have as their essential and ultimate func-
tion the propagation of [a] particular view of what history is” [6, p. 59].
Throughout this work, Jameson has also repeatedly denounced criticism
that seeks to assign value to texts. While he has remained open about
his own ideological imperatives—“to transcend the ‘ethical’ in the direc-
tion of the political and the collective”, for example—he has been less
self-reflexive or transparent about the formation of his own canon, and
the boundaries created by his specific focuses [6, p. 60]. Therefore, while
often making bold proclamations about the period, or seeking to envisage
historical totality, he has taken less time to consider what his specific view
of the nineteenth century actively leaves out, or discounts.
Jameson repeatedly returns to the works of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola,
and the authors often dominate his depictions of the nineteenth century.
They are both the focus of either essays or extended passages, as well
as being the figures most commonly referred to in Jameson’s more
glancing interactions with the period. Frequently, he discusses the three
in explicit relation to each other. In this manner, they form a narra-
tive of stylistic development in literature that is hermetically French and
realist (if we accept Jameson’s reframing of Zola, and of naturalism more
generally). Jameson often positions this lineage in terms of the century’s
modernisation. In Marxism and Form, he claims:
In Balzac, factories do not exist as such: we watch not the end products
but the efforts of the great capitalists and inventors to construct them.…
But the only factory in the works of Flaubert is that pottery works which is
but a passing stage in Arnoux’s checkered career.… When Zola, impatient
with this massive lifelessness, tries to breathe vitality into it, he can only
do so by recourse to myth and melodramatic violence. [7, p. 204]
This narrative will be repeated on a number of occasions, notably in

essays such as “Imaginary and Symbolic in La Rabouilleuse” (1977) and
“The Realist Floor-Plan” (1985), as well as The Political Unconscious . For
Jameson, Balzac stands as the essential early instance of high realism: his
fiction is partly immersed in older storytelling modes, but his literature
predicts a more developed moment, which Jameson occasionally aligns

with Dickens’ London novels.
Balzac’s depictions of French history are an inherent component of
Jameson’s interest in the author. In a reinterpretation of Lukács’ sense of
the historical novel, Jameson argues, “Lukács is right about Balzac, but
for the wrong reasons: not Balzac’s deeper sense of political and histor-
ical realities, but rather his incorrigible fantasy demands ultimately raise
History itself over against him, as absent cause, as that on which desire
comes to grief” [6, p. 183]. In this manner, Jameson positions a notion
of historical, social and political mapping within a theory of the polit-
ical unconscious. This manoeuvre allows for certain aspects of Lukács’
theory to remain relevant in an age of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic
criticism that would otherwise question realism’s truth claims [see 13,
pp. 141–148; 14, pp. 64–65]. Jameson is interested in Balzac’s realism,
not just because of it produces a cohesive representation of social terrain,
but because this mapping procedure “may be associated with [the] initial
stockpiling of social and anecdotal raw material for processing and ulti-
mate transformation into marketable, that is to say narratable, shapes
and forms” [7, p. 10]. In a similar fashion, Jameson reframes Engels’
sense of Balzac giving us “a most wonderfully realistic history of French
‘society,’ describing, chronicle-fashion, almost year by year … the progres-
sive inroads of the rising bourgeoisie upon the society of nobles” [15,
p. 115]. For Jameson, the extended form of La Comédie humaine allows
Balzac’s work to become “the model that now helps us to read the bewil-
dering and massive substance of the real of which it began by being the
projection” [7, p. 11]. These discussions accentuate Jameson’s varying
interests in realism: Balzac is of significance because his realist aesthetics
provide a wider purview of social formations, his lengthy career offers
a particular historical perspective on capitalist developments in the nine-
teenth century, and the formal qualities and alterations of his novels align
with the larger transformations in French society at the time.
In Jameson’s discussions of Flaubert, his second example of realism,
this work continues. For example, Jameson argues against Roland
Barthes’ reading of “A Simple Soul” in “L’effet de réel ” (1968). In the
essay, Barthes claims, “Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally
say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of ‘the real’ (and not
its contingent contents) which is then signified; in other words, the very
absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes
the very signifier of realism” [13, p. 148]. For Jameson, however, critics
42 J. COGLE
should place these problems of language and realism’s truth claims within
particular historical frameworks. He claims, “what is significant for us,
even if the reference is to be taken to be a mirage, lies in the ‘reality of the
appearance’ and the way in which belief in reference governs the practices
of nineteenth-century daily life and of the nineteenth-century ‘realistic’
aesthetic” [16, p. 375]. As with Balzac, Jameson is less interested in
Flaubert’s depiction of reality, but rather the further emergence of the
bourgeois individual subject, as it has developed throughout capitalism
up to that point. For Jameson, style indirect libre, and other elements of
Flaubert’s impersonal style, will come to be associated with the reifica-
tion of middle-class space, the older traditions’ subsequent emptying of
content, and the appearance of affect as a major category in the realist
novel. Jameson states that, “in Flaubert, Balzacian fantasy is effaced, its
place taken by the … phenomena of bovarysme, that ‘desire to desire’
whose objects have become illusory images” [6, p. 184]. In “The Realist
Floor-Plan”, the appearance of a musty smell in “A Simple Soul” signi-
fies the emergence of affect. Affect, in this iteration at least, becomes
a more ancient sensory perception that resists the reification of middle-
class culture found elsewhere, actively reading against Barthes’ sense that
realism is merely a self-conscious attempt to convey plausibility or detail.
In Marxism and Form, Jameson will describe a similar narrative, “of an
absolute difference between that literature which is ours, and which began
around the time of Baudelaire and Flaubert, and the classical literature
that preceded it” [7, p. 199]. While this narrative is qualified and compli-
cated even as Jameson suggests it, the alienation of individual subjectivity
in Flaubert’s writing is of major importance to Jameson’s sense of the
development of realism.
Jameson’s use for Zola, at least in the earlier parts of his career, is
somewhat more marginal. The author remains an endpoint for Jameson’s
narrative of nineteenth-century realism, whereby Zola’s varying formal
strategies struggle to map or contain the social milieu he represents.
Elsewhere, Jameson’s positioning of Zola as the successor to Balzac and
Flaubert’s realist tradition works to reinstate the author, and naturalism
in general, within the realist canon. Here, the argument is both with a
traditional sense of French realism, but also with the theory of Lukács,
who sees naturalism’s focus on description as an impoverishment of earlier
realist qualities. Lukács states:
Here we have … naturalism, in concentrated essence and in sharp oppo-

sition to the traditions of the old realism.… The tension of the old-type
story, the co-operation and clashing of human beings who are both individ-
uals and at the same time representatives of important class tendencies—all
these are eliminated and their place is taken by “average” characters
whose individual traits are accidents from the artistic point of view. [17,
pp. 90–91]
In Marxism and Form’s placement of the French authors in a context

of narrative possibility, Jameson begins his ongoing work to historicise
Lukács’ theory of realism, particularly in relation to Zola: “For [Zola] the
basic raw material [is] already established in advance … he has succumbed
… to the mirage of some static, objective knowledge of society.… From
Lukács’ point of view … this means that the novel … has ceased to
become the privileged instrument of the analysis of reality and has been
degraded to a mere illustration of a thesis” [7, pp. 194–195]. Lukács sees
Zola’s aesthetic choices as preventing him from writing a productively
Marxist literature and sees realism as continuing well into the twentieth
century with the work of Thomas Mann. Jameson sees naturalism in
terms of historical possibility, however, and he claims that Zola’s novels
must negotiate and represent a moment of increased social reification. For
Jameson, the increasing administered world of late nineteenth-century
France provides a number of formal challenges, but he is also interested
in placing Zola’s literature in relation to the coming divergence between
high modernism and a degraded popular literature. In this capacity, the
constrained formal strategies of naturalism have both an aesthetic and
literary importance, but also a social one.
In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson will continue in this vein, again
writing against the sense that naturalism resides somewhat outside the
realist canon. For Jameson, Zola’s “unrequited claim to stand amongst
Lukács’ ‘great realists’ should not be shaken by his political opinions nor
by his enthusiastic practice of melodrama … nor is the naturalism debate
… relevant for our own purposes here, except insofar as it plays its part in
contemporary literary tug-of-war” [12, p. 45]. Jameson devotes an entire
chapter to describing the historical importance of Zola’s extensive descrip-
tive passages within the context of affect in the nineteenth-century novel.
The work to reinstate Zola into another stricter version of the canon, and
the interest in these novelists in general, reinforces realism’s importance
to Jameson as “traditionally in one form or another the central model
44 J. COGLE
of Marxist aesthetics as a narrative discourse which unites the experience

of daily life with a properly cognitive, mapping, or well-nigh ‘scientific’
perspective” [6, p. 104]. As in the work of “The Realist Floor-Plan” to
move past Barthes’ problematising of realism, Jameson seeks to main-
tain the traditional aspects of Marxist criticism, but remains aware of its
difficult relationship with poststructuralist thought. Jameson, in his early
career at least, is rarely interested in determining how realism operates as
a kind of mirage, but rather in how that mirage reflects or even creates
the subject’s experience of nineteenth-century consciousness and daily
life. At the same time, while he often pays attention to these represen-
tational problems, it is usually in the service of moving beyond them.
This commonly results in Jameson merely reinstating realism’s “nigh-
scientific” ability to map the world around it, as seen in earlier Marxist
theory.
In Marxism and Form, Jameson will casually align his French lineage
with the development of “Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne in the English
novel” [7, p. 314]. There are a number of parallels between these
examples—particularly their relationships to the French and Glorious
Revolutions and the subsequent evolution of capitalism—but Jameson
does not discuss the English authors any further. Indeed, he is less inter-
ested in the progression of the English novel throughout either the
eighteenth or nineteenth century. For example, he casually refers to Ian
Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) on a number of occasions, but he
has never seriously engaged with the text. Raymond Williams is a perhaps
more intriguing example, given that he appears regularly in Jameson’s
work, most often as a figure in which to borrow specific conceptual
ideas and terminology from, such as “structure of feeling” [see 18, p.
xiv]. Jameson cites Williams’ The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence
(1970) on several occasions in The Political Unconscious , but only briefly
does Jameson discuss a sense of British history. At one point, he considers
Conrad’s Lord Jim in terms of “the British empire, the heroic bureaucracy
of imperial capitalism which takes that lesser, but sometimes even more
heroic, bureaucracy of the officers of the merchant fleet as a figure for
itself” [6, p. 265]. The discussion is cut short, however, and Jameson does
not integrate notions of British imperialism into in his wider notions of
capitalist development. Instead, he provides a lengthy citation of Williams
in a footnote [see 6, p. 265n].
By contrasting Williams’ sense of Dickens with that of Jameson’s,
it becomes clear that the historical perspective Jameson extends to the
French canon does not appear in his treatment of English authors. For
Williams, Dickens’ novels are a significant literary development, and they

perform a similar type of mapping operation to the one Jameson describes
in his readings of certain French novels. Williams also accentuates the
formal developments found in Dickens, and he sees these components in
larger historical contexts, particularly London’s growth throughout the
nineteenth century:
Dickens’s creation of a new kind of novel … can be directly related to

what we must see as [a] double condition: the random and the systematic,
the visible and the obscured, which is the true significance of the city, and
especially at this period of the capital city, as a dominant social form.
Dickens’s ultimate vision of London is then not to be illustrated by
topography or local instance. It lies in the form of his novels: in their
kind of narrative, in their method of characterisation, in their genius for
typification. [19, p. 154]
Jameson reads Dickens in much simpler terms. He does not discuss Dick-
ens’ narratives in terms of formal innovation, or their relationship to
historical change, but in how they work through a number of more
general cultural tendencies. Rather than representing certain social types
in a Lukácsian sense, Dickens’ characters signify particular social values,
similar to Vladimir Propp’s readings of folk stories. For example:
In Hard Times we witness the confrontation of what amount to two

antagonistic intellectual systems: Mr. Gradgrind’s utilitarianism (“Facts!
Facts!”) and that world of anti-facts symbolized by Sissy Jupe and the
circus, or in other words, imagination. The novel is primarily the educa-
tion of the educator, the conversion of Mr. Gradgrind from his inhuman
system to the opposing one. It is thus a series of lessons administered to
Mr. Gradgrind, and we may sort these lessons into two groups and see
them as the symbolic answers to two kinds of questions.… What happens
when you negate or deny imagination? What would happen if, on the
contrary, you negated facts? … The plot is nothing but an attempt … to
work through the faulty solutions and unacceptable hypotheses until an
adequate embodiment has been realized in terms of the narrative material.
[8, p. 167]
Elsewhere, Dickens’ literary aesthetic or sense of narrative is seen in terms

of the development of commercial style: “the ‘style’ of Dickens is if
anything a form of packaging, a mannerism, an annoying or delightful
46 J. COGLE
‘supplement’ to those novel-products which it was his social role to

furnish. But in modern times, it is clearly ‘style’ itself, or ‘world,’ or
world-view, which the novelist supplies” [8, pp. 132–133]. For Jameson,
Dickens anticipates the degraded popular fiction emerges in the early
twentieth century. He further accentuates this notion in the essay “Imag-
inary and Symbolic in La Rabouilleuse”. Here, he sees the English author
within the lineage of Balzac and Flaubert, in a discussion of Balzac’s
character Philippe: “We can measure the transformation of the Balzacian
figure into a stock villain by recalling the classic engravings that illustrate
Dickens and Eugene Sue.… In the later writers—who may be considered
… as an intermediate generation between Balzac and … Flaubert—such a
character is … an ahistorical Other, a … caricatural representation of Evil”
[20, pp. 63–64]. This reading treats Dickens as a figure who inherits the
formal inventions of Balzac, but also as one whose characterisation of
various social types returns to an older, ethical storytelling mode. The
essay, atypical in a number of ways for Jameson, would appear in heavily
modified form as the third chapter in The Political Unconscious , with
Jameson removing the commentary on Dickens.1 He does not develop
the connection between Dickens, Sue and other English realists and the
French lineage further elsewhere. Furthermore, Jameson does not see
Dickens in relation to a more crowded field of English authors, such
as William Thackeray or George Eliot, or less central examples, such as
Charlotte Brontë or Elizabeth Gaskell. The English canon perhaps does
not have as clear a relationship to economic and stylistic development,
and Jameson does little work to consider its lineage.
Jameson’s short chapter on George Gissing in The Political Uncon-
scious will be one of few moments where he places English authors in a
wider historical context. Once again, however, he portrays Gissing and
others as followers of a stronger French canon, which also doubles as
a stronger narrative of development. The passage above from “Imagi-
nary and Symbolic in La Rabouilleuse” is perhaps indicative of Jameson’s
restricted use of Dickens, and many other English authors: the use of
the term “ahistorical” is often a clear sign that these novels are not as
productive for his Marxist analyses. In the essay, he describes how the
“introduction of ethics into novelistic efforts to represent the disorders
of early industrial society may … be understood as a repression of the
historical … and one of the major strategies of bourgeois ideology in its
effort to reconceptualize the social order … hence the profound affinity
between Victorian ideology and the melodrama” [20, p. 64]. This treat-
ment of Dickens obviously differs to Jameson’s reading of the French
figures of Flaubert or Zola, whose particular voices are more often seen
in terms of a refiguring of realist style and how it functions in relation
to its subject matter, as well as the way in which they inherit a partic-
ular set of conventions from their predecessor. Jameson goes as far as to
dismiss any sense of progression in English realism when he notes “the
gestures and signals of the storyteller [are] perpetuated in the English
novel well beyond 1857, the year Flaubert abolishes them with a single
stroke in France” [6, pp. 154–155]. In the chapter on Gissing, Jameson
describes the author as being thought of as “the most ‘French’ … of
British Naturalists” [6, p. 186]. He sees Gissing predominantly in rela-
tion to the representative naturalism of Zola, although Jameson makes
a number of concessions to Gissing’s position in an English tradition
exemplified by Dickens. Here Jameson’s discussion of Dickensian narra-
tive paradigms reinforces the sentimentality and melodrama of “the angel
of the hearth” trope, and the problematics inherent in the Victorian
novel’s interest in the lower class. In these moments, Jameson privileges
the formal and stylistic developments of the French novel, over that of the
English in particular. We might dispute this depiction of realism’s progres-
sion throughout the nineteenth century in several ways; however, of more
importance to this book is the manner in which Jameson concentrates on
texts that are at the forefront of literary or cultural development. While
his model of historical change emphasises the persistence of older histor-
ical modes, he consistently disregards textual material that he describes as
regressive in some fashion. His focus remains on novels that are the flash-
points for change, even as his sense of cultural progression accentuates a
slower process of mediation and conflict.
In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson’s focus broadens in a number
of ways, with chapters on Spanish, Russian and English figures. Never-
theless, critics have noted the absences or exclusions that make their way
into the text. In reply to a roundtable published in Journal of American
Studies, Jameson notes, “this collection of Americanist responses to my
book on realism demands what I take to be an autobiographical response,
some explanation about the exclusion of American novels, something I’m
always reluctant to give” [21, p. 1086]. In another rejoinder to a group
of essays discussing The Antinomies of Realism in the nonsite.org journal,
however, he elaborates on his national choices in more detail:
48 J. COGLE
Antinomies is not a monograph but a theoretical exercise or essay; and

I’m rather proud of the way in which my exhibits touch in turn on all
the major national languages in the Western realist tradition, from Russia
to the U.S. (Dickens is implicitly touched on in the discussion of first-
person narrative, inasmuch as he was a kind of actor who essentially wrote
scripts for his own performances.) But other exclusions … had a more
practical point to them: The entire English tradition was omitted … as
a pointed reminder that there are other languages and literatures … in
the world and in history. I began with Zola in order to restore his always
ambiguous reputation and his extraordinary achievement (it is after all the
naturalist novel which was the great world-wide influence and not Balzac
or Jane Austin or Goethe, however dear they may be to some of us); and
I placed Galdós at the very center in order to deprovincialize our standard
canon and to win a little more interest in this immense figure.… At any
rate, the theoretical sketch I offered was not without its polemic digs and
conspiratorial innuendoes. [22, pp. 102–103]
Jameson rarely acknowledges a sense of purpose in his textual focuses,

or of “polemic digs and conspiratorial innuendoes”. Elsewhere, he has
consistently sought to diminish the importance or considered nature of
his literary interests. While he does discuss George Eliot at some length
in The Antinomies of Realism, the text does provide an expansive sense
of Western realist literature outside of the English tradition also. In this
regard, it would seem that notions of genre, rather than nation, impinge
more directly in Jameson’s sense of the realist canon.
Realism and the Problem of Genre: Melodrama,

the Romance and Women’s Writing
As the survey of French and English figures denotes, the more devel-
oped sense of historical and social mapping that Jameson finds in the
works of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola privileges a more highbrow sense of
realism and the nineteenth century in general. Jameson does not extend
his focus to include literature that we might place in more populist generic
boundaries, particularly that of the romance, or even the bildungsroman.
Dickens seems to delineate a certain boundary for Jameson: the author
represents a more melodramatic English tradition, but aspires to social
realism in later works. Jameson rarely discusses romantic novels by figures
such as Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë, even as they denote certain
developments in the novel form. Jameson repeatedly sees the realist tradi-
tion in France as a lineage that clearly connects “the mature and original
possibilities in the nineteenth century” with older narrative forms, as well
as the high modernism of the early twentieth century [6, p. 151]. This
sense of older cultural forms, and particularly an engagement with the
eighteenth century, remains sporadic across his career. His discussions of
earlier, more synchronic forms of literature are less developed, given that
their relationship to historical change is less visible. In this manner, he has
only briefly considered how English romances of the nineteenth century
might differ to a more traditional iteration of this particular literary form.
Often the earlier storytelling modes appear as simply “raw material”: less
complex, pure narrative forms that are both indicative of a time before
capitalist alienation, but also of little concern for Jameson’s sense of
developing reification.
Jameson does, however, have a recurring interest in Miguel de
Cervantes. His positioning of Don Quixote (1605) in relation to other
important precursors of the realist novel, such as Robinson Crusoe (1719),
allows us some insight into how Jameson’s delineation between realism
and romance functions. We can align his treatment of Don Quixote with
his perennial continental focus and privileging of certain genres. While
also seen in terms of its relationship to Lukács’ concept of abstract
idealism, Jameson predominantly discusses the texts as an important stage
for the novel’s development into high art. He claims, “reality is of course
interiorized in the novel in the form of the romances and dreams of
chivalry, so that the novel as a whole becomes not the unquestioned and
degraded storytelling of these popular adventure stories, but a reflection
on the very possibility of storytelling itself, a coming to self-consciousness
of narration” [6, pp. 174–175]. This conceptual component attributed
to Don Quixote reinforces a sense of realism’s self-reflexivity, at the same
time as discounting forms of the romance that persist throughout the
nineteenth century. Jameson further develops a sense of the realist novel
as in opposition to the romance in The Political Unconscious , whereby,
as various theories “of realism assert, and as the totemic ancestor of the
novel, Don Quixote, emblematically demonstrates, that processing oper-
ation … called … realistic representation has as its historic function the
systematic undermining and demystification, the secular ‘decoding’, of
those preexisting … narrative paradigms which are its initial givens” [6,
p. 152]. In this fashion, Jameson sees realism as a reworking earlier narra-
tive forms and therefore can be differentiated from novels that remain
50 J. COGLE
committed to earlier generic modes. We can see his relative lack of interest
in Robinson Crusoe as a starting point for the novel in terms of its more
traditional appropriation of the romance narrative. In the rare instances
he has discussed Robinson Crusoe, the conceptual valences allowed it are
not comparable with Don Quixote. In “‘If I Can Find One Good City I
Will Spare the Man’: Realism and Utopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars
Trilogy”, Jameson will contrast the science fiction novels with Robinson
Crusoe. He finds Defoe’s work lacking a comparative ability to sepa-
rate “the elements of human labor from the underlying conditions of
Being itself”, limiting its possibility in Marxist terms [23, p. 402.] In
these moments, despite maintaining that generic boundaries are fluid and
“interminable”, Jameson privileges realist examples that have developed
away from the romantic mode as much as possible.
Nevertheless, this differentiation between realism and the romance
often remains unspoken. Jameson does not often explicate the manner in
which the boundary between the two operates. The major exception to
this tendency is in The Political Unconscious , which features one chapter
focusing on the romance at length. Here Jameson constructs a narra-
tive of the genre’s development that delineates several turning points
in its lengthy history. Nevertheless, this sense of categorisation will only
become more slippery across the chapter:
Is not … Manzoni’s great work, far from being a romance, rather one of
the supreme embodiments of what we call the historical novel? … And
are not Stendhal’s novels far more easily ranged under the more tradi-
tional notion of the Bildungsroman? All these uncertainties … are evidently
generated by a “form”—the novel—which is not assimilable to either of
the critical options of mode or of narrative structure. [6, p. 143]
We should note that, while Wuthering Heights (1847) appears as one of

Jameson’s most visible examples of the romance in the nineteenth century
in this chapter, the texts discussed remain predominantly continental.
Jameson returns to Stendhal’s two major novels on several occasions,
and he makes recurring references to Alessandro Manzoni, Joseph von
Eichendorff, Alain Fournier, and Julien Gracq, amongst others. Brontë
is the predominant example of the English tradition in the chapter, with
Jameson making passing mentions of Sir Walter Scott and Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando (1928). Outside of this chapter, Stendhal is the only figure who
Jameson will return to with any regularity across his various references to
nineteenth-century literature. Even as he points out the incompatibility

of strict generic categorisation, his nineteenth-century canon privileges
realism in terms of aesthetics, political agency and its relationship with
the historical. Through this focus, he manages to discuss nineteenth-
century literature in terms of complex formal and generic terms—in a way
that speaks to poststructuralist notions of heterogeneity—but also main-
tains the strict sense of realist aesthetics found in Lukács. For Jameson,
the French lineage is the strongest break from the ideologies of earlier
storytelling modes. Curiously, it is within a framework of ethics that he
will argue against the attribution of worth to cultural material, but also
criticise certain literary forms.
Jameson categorises the melodrama and the romance in negative terms,
often through attributing these forms a sense of ethical values. He
performs this operation by considering a traditional antinomy between
good and evil within these forms. In The Political Unconscious , he
constructs a narrative that charts the progression of the romance from
Shakespeare up until the early twentieth century. He extrapolates from
Northrop Frye’s discussions of the romance to claim, “romance is …
a wish-fulfillment or Utopian fantasy which aims at the transfiguration
of the world of everyday life in such a way as to restore the conditions
of some lost Eden, or to anticipate a future realm from which the old
mortality and imperfections will have been effaced” [6, p. 110]. For
Jameson, the mutations in the romance form often align with alterations
to the category of the villain. For example, he claims that the villain
changes from an identifiable Other—whether racial, social or political—
to one that resists identification or class coherence as society moves into
the Feudal mode. In early capitalist society, this sense of ethics will change
again, becoming, for Jameson, theological, psychological or metaphoric in
its application. We can perhaps see George Eliot’s absence from Jameson’s
realist canon up until The Antinomies of Realism in this light. Eliot’s
inveterate moralising and use of metaphor to lecture her characters, along
with her occasional use of melodramatic form, ensures Jameson’s lack
of interest. Terry Eagleton discusses Jameson’s perennial exposure and
denunciation of ethical or moral thought in his review of Archaeologies of
the Future:
Jameson is notoriously averse to moral thought, and vents his hostility to

it at one point in this book. Ethics, in his opinion, is a simplistic oppo-
sition of good and evil, one which stands in for historical and political
52 J. COGLE
investigation.… Again and again in his work, he has set up this tattered
straw man of ethical thought, partly to have the pleasure of bowling it
over with a materialist flourish. He does not seem to grasp that moral
language includes terms that this book uses in plenty, such as “beau-
tiful,” “catastrophe,” “terrible” and “repellent.” It is hard to know why
an anti-moralist should object to poverty or unemployment, or how he
can explain in non-moral language why he finds the utopian impulse so
precious. Does Jameson imagine that notions such as justice, freedom,
solidarity and emancipation are non-moral? [24]
Even as Eagleton’s broad enquiry into Jameson’s sense of morality raises

a number of problems for Marxist theory, traditional Marxist readings
have repeatedly seen genres that reinforce this kind of value system
as of dubious value. Jameson continues that kind of work here, once
again following Lukács’ critical mode in particular. For example, Jameson
instates a hierarchy of genre when he claims, “when, in something that
looks like a tragedy, we encounter judgments of a more properly ethical
type … the text in question is rather to be considered a melodrama, that
is, a degraded form of romance” [6, p. 116]. We can further glimpse
this sense of melodrama in a passage on Balzac: “Balzac … is pre-
melodramatic, for at his particular stage in social history as well as in
that of the development of the form, such ethical side-taking has not yet
made its appearance, and we still have to do with something like an energy
model, in which characters are ultimately weighed against each other in
terms of their dynamism, whether for good or evil” [20, p. 64]. In this
regard, Jameson’s categorisation of melodrama is idiosyncratically literary,
and almost wholly concentrated on novels of the nineteenth century—
despite melodrama’s historical ties to stage, musical performance and
eighteenth-century forms. At the same time, it becomes apparent that
within his various appeals to move away from ethical systems of thought,
and particularly criticism that masks its deeper ethical tendencies, his
criticism of particular genres has its own ideological or ethical imperative.
In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson will encounter another set
of difficulties related to melodrama in his treatment of George Eliot.
Jameson once again engages with a notion of ethics in relation to melo-
drama, positioning Middlemarch as an illustrative example of how a
“serious novel” is able to produce a villain. He poses this formal problem
in terms of evil’s innate otherness: “the philosophical question par excel-
lence, namely how my ‘good’ could ever be evil” [12, p. 116]. For the
realist novel’s description of subjective interiority, this creates a difficulty

in producing an antagonist in a more traditional sense. Jameson sees Eliot
as developing from a writer of melodrama to one of high realism and he
reads Romola’s antagonist Tito as a defining moment in this transition.
Jameson discusses Tito’s complex motivations within the rubric of Sartre’s
“mauvaise foi”, or bad faith: “The technical expression is borrowed from
daily life and in particular from those disputes in which one of the
interlocutors … produces one after the other reasons and demonstra-
tions palpably in contradiction with one another for the sole purpose of
winning the argument.… In Sartrean bad faith, this argument in interior-
ized” [12, p. 129]. The “crucial experiment” of Tito then reaches a more
sophisticated level of characterisation in Middlemarch, whereby Casaubon
and Bulstrode are seen as “former villains: and what they do and do not
do for the plot in that status forms the supreme proof and example of
that dissolution of melodrama I am arguing for, with all its results for
the classic form of novelistic realism which it fulfils and undermines at
one and the same time” [12, p. 130]. The manner in which Jameson
sees Bulstrode’s motivations in particular as “moral laziness” allows for
a manoeuvre away from the binary of good and evil. In this fashion,
Eliot’s work is able to rise to the position of “serious novel”. Jameson
argues that the conceptual nuances afforded the villains in Eliot’s Romola
and Middlemarch free the realist novel from an older narrative concern
of ethics—now the territory of a more degraded literary melodrama. He
claims, “mauvaise foi exists in order to undermine the ethical binary and
to discredit the metaphysical and moral ideologies of evil at the same time
that the latter’s uses in plot formation and construction are replaced with
at least some rough equivalent” [12, p. 137]. This discussion of a singular
author, extrapolated in such a way as to represent a vast development in
the nature of realism, may raise any number of questions, particularly in
relation to notions of periodisation, literary production and history as a
narrative construct. This particular narrative, however, seems predomi-
nantly essential only to the generic boundaries Jameson denotes between
melodrama and high realism.
Later in The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson will discuss Eliot’s Daniel
Deronda in terms of this narrative: “The figure of Grandcourt … belongs
unmistakably in the cast of characters of archetypal melodrama. Yet what
can account for this remarkable formal regression on George Eliot’s part,
in a work which otherwise in formal and stylistic energy and intelligence
is in no way inferior to Middlemarch? Surprisingly enough, I believe the
54 J. COGLE
reasons are political” [12, p. 157]. With some difficulty, Jameson will
frame Grandcourt within the context of Eliot’s own politics, an Enlight-
enment critique of the upper class, and the category of the gothic. The
reader is ultimately to understand that the novel’s use of melodramatic
tropes operates within a more complicated conceptual framework than
Eliot’s earlier work. For Jameson, the novel is not a regression but
an appropriation of an older melodramatic mode, becoming “a conjec-
ture between the melodramatic denunciation of the persistence of the
English ancien régime and the Utopian vision of another kind of organic
community now set, not in the English past, but in some unfamiliar
future landscape” [12, p. 159]. Jameson makes this argument in order
to retain his earlier narrative of development in Eliot and the realist
novel, but then abruptly returns to his own sense of genre as intrinsically
fluid, seeing the majority of his examples—including his three paradig-
matic French authors—in terms of persistent romantic or melodramatic
elements built into the novel form itself. This is qualified in some sense,
with Jameson claiming his argument has not been that realism means “the
utter effacement of that manifestation of destiny and its récits which is the
melodramatic mode: but only its weakening and tendential attenuation in
the face of its opposite number, the scene, affect, the eternal present”
[12, p. 160]. This remains in stark contrast to his strict treatment of the
melodrama, along with the romance, across his career.
Implicit in this treatment of romance and melodrama is a lack of
interest in even more “degraded” genres. Jameson does not often discuss
supernatural and gothic tales, along with the sensation novel. He casually
remarks that science fiction is “conventionally assigned an inaugural date
of 1895—Wells’ Time Machine—if not 1818—Mary Shelley’s Franken-
stein”, but has never investigated the genre’s development over the
nineteenth century [23, p. 57]. Considering Jameson’s ongoing work
on the science fiction of the twentieth century, it is somewhat curious
that he has rarely commented on earlier examples of the genre, or the
antecedents found in gothic works like Frankenstein or The Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), for example. This uncharacteristic lack
of writing on the science fiction of the period reinforces Jameson’s strict
focus on realism. While he privileges twentieth- and twenty-first-century
science fiction and often theorises why it possesses Utopian and critical
possibility, he has not often commented on whether earlier examples of
the genre attain these kinds of qualities. For Jameson, the realist novel
is at the pinnacle of cultural production at the time, and this situation
ensures his predominant interest in the form. In reviews of The Anti-

nomies of Realism, critics have claimed that there are opportunities for
productive extensions of Jameson’s most suggestive ideas. For Robert
Brazeau “when read for the coherence of its argument, [The Antinomies
of Realism] sometimes seems unconvincing, overly strident, or, worse yet,
polemical for the sake of being polemical; however, it offers an enviably
broad range of references and models expert critical-reading strategies
that scholars can redeploy in the context of their own work” [25, p. 876].
In discussing how other literary genres, such as the gothic novel, would fit
into The Antinomies of Realism’s narrative of realism and affect, scholarly
production may find further uses for Jameson’s text. Ironically, any effort
to see a larger group of texts within this model of the novel’s construction
must move beyond his own restrictive delineation of the canon.
The question of gender in Jameson’s work becomes prominent in this
consideration of genre. While not as regularly mentioned as some other
critiques, feminist theorists have remained sceptical of Jameson’s treat-
ment of gender. Elaine Showalter claims Jameson’s “political conscious,
like his political unconscious, has been unabashedly phallocentric” [26,
p. 118]. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sianne Ngai and Kathleen Martin-
dale have also criticised Jameson’s reading practice as inherently male
[see 27, pp. 123–151; 28, pp. 298–331; 3]. For example, Sianne Ngai
compares Jameson’s paranoid readings with the Cold War espionage films
he has discussed, along with the positions of their typically male heroes.
Nevertheless, these feminist enquiries have not extended to a discus-
sion of Jameson’s treatment of women writers and genres that are more
interested in female experience and space. While prominent figures such
as Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison are interesting exclusions from
Jameson’s canon, the absence of women authors in his view of nineteenth-
century literature is especially noticeable, given their prominence in the
period and the importance of feminine domestic space to many kinds
of nineteenth-century novel. As evidenced in the proceeding discus-
sion, Jameson’s French focus denotes a decreased interest in the English
novel of the nineteenth century. His strict categorisation of realism also
precludes any extended engagement with novels more aligned with the
romance. In this fashion, his depiction of nineteenth-century literature
seriously limits an inclusion of writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Elizabeth
Braddon, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell or
Mary Shelley, to name some prominent examples.
56 J. COGLE
Through these categorising operations, Jameson also restricts the

importance of the “domestic” to notions of nineteenth-century expe-
rience, and nineteenth-century literature. As the blurb for the most
recent edition of The Ideologies of Realism claims, Jameson’s work
over the last forty years denotes “a shift from ideological analysis to
the phenomenology of everyday life” [29]. His discussions of realism,
however, continue to concentrate on the public and social spaces of the
nineteenth-century everyday. When he does concentrate on the domestic,
his primary example is that of Flaubert. Ngai claims that Jameson’s post-
modern textual examples emphasise a particularly male understanding
of contemporary social contexts, and his reading practice exemplifies a
certain privileged and gendered kind of interpretive operation. Similarly,
his insistence on a predominantly male group of novelists, ones who often
aspire to an all-encompassing representation of Western capitalist society,
and who concentrate on the external world of economics, law and trade,
denotes another highly gendered understanding of nineteenth-century
cultural material. Meanwhile, even as The Antinomies of Realism details
a larger sense of the realist novel as containing its generic predecessors
and rivals, and go some way to discussing at least one major nineteenth-
century woman writer, some absences remain intriguing. For example,
there is a conspicuous lack of interest in Jane Austen within an ongoing
discussion about style indirect libre.2 Once again, when considering this
eschewal of gender, we might refer to his academic training at a point
in time when the canon was much more restricted. We might also point,
however, to a wider reluctance to include issues of identity in his theo-
retical project. This is in spite of the rise of fields such as postcolonial,
queer and gender studies, all of which concentrate on issues of identity
to some degree. Jameson has never directly responded to criticism of his
treatment of gender by several highly prominent theorists. This aversion
to politics of identity aligns with his muted response to the controversy
surrounding his essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism”, and the accusations of an empiricist and othering ideology
levelled at him, particularly by Aijaz Ahmad. Despite an interest in class as
it has spread in a global context, this has not stretched to any discussion
of the particularities of identity marked by different kinds of postcolo-
nial history. This extends to an almost complete aversion to questions of
race across his career. In his treatment of nineteenth-century literature,
we might position the lack of discussion of racial identity in relation to
his aversion to American literature, although he also avoids this question

in his chapter on Conrad in The Political Unconscious .
While the extremely limited discussion of race allows for only rudi-
mentary commentary on its exclusion, Jameson has made a number of
statements that belie a more obviously problematic approach to feminist
discourse and to the notion of gender in nineteenth-century literature
in particular. In The Political Unconscious , he claims, “The affirmation
of radical feminism … that to annul the patriarchal is the most radical
political act—insofar as it … subsumes more partial demands, such as the
liberation from the commodity form—is thus perfectly consistent with an
expanded Marxian framework, for which the transformation of our own
dominant mode of production must be accompanied” [6, p. 100]. While
Jameson aligns his model of the superstructure with feminist discourse,
he rapidly folds a notion of class struggle based on gender into his
own theory, and he rarely discusses this problematic again. In The Anti-
nomies of Realism, he claims that “it is paradoxical and even a great
contradiction that women figures … become the great stars of the nine-
teenth century novel … a situation in which the role of the adulteress
becomes the negative or privative one of showing that there is no place
for them in that bourgeois society whose representation was to have been
the object of the novel in the first place!” [12, p. 148]. Yet, the book
will remain uninterested in categories such as domestic fiction, or even
female writers of the nineteenth century at large. Indeed, the two exam-
ples Jameson uses at this point are Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877)
and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). Jameson often mentions Madame
Bovary in his work; however, he usually discusses the novel in terms of
Flaubert’s style, not in his depiction of the middle-class female. In “The
Realist Floor-Plan”, when he does bring up the notion of female expe-
rience in the novel, Jameson is quick to return the discussion to more
generalised notions of class. In this manner, he claims “a more ambi-
tious study of the social investments of Flaubert’s libido—the privileged
relationship between women’s experience, as in Madame Bovary itself,
and the construction of narrative—would probably explain this affinity
less in terms of sexuality than in terms of social marginalization” [16,
p. 378]. Jameson’s treatment of Ursula Le Guin in his larger discussions
of science fiction foreground an interest in feminist notions of utopia,
and he persistently makes brief acknowledgement of gender issues. Never-
theless, Jameson’s comments elsewhere commonly work in a different
direction. Even if we do not criticise his work in these specifically feminist
58 J. COGLE
terms, this discussion of gender points to ways in which the totalising,

impersonal and distant elements of his practice do not acknowledge what
texts, forms and tropes are left out because of subjective or contextual
choices, or what is privileged in their place.
Realism and the Nineteenth Century:

Transformation and Decoding
As seen in the discussion of genre, Jameson’s early work closely connects
the realism of the nineteenth century to the period’s economic and
cultural development. Jameson often describes postmodern literature as
lacking an ability to engage in the historical, while reading high-modernist
novels as more aesthetically self-involved reactions to the political and
economic. Realism, on the other hand, has a privileged relationship to
the world it describes. Jameson’s descriptions of nineteenth-century capi-
talist growth can often be fragmentary and divergent, appearing in brief
expository passages that describe the period as one of rapid and immense
change. His treatment of literature, however, offers a more sustained and
complex view of the century, one in which smaller historical moments
are unpacked in conjunction with a text’s formal qualities. We can also
understand the tension between these two facets of his project within
the context of two dominant strands of his thought. In The Political
Unconscious , he argues for a sense of historical change that is contradic-
tory, which sees modes of production in conflict with each other, and he
reads texts as being a witness to moments of “permanent social revo-
lution”. At the same time, his narrative of reification, borrowed from
Lukács, describes the spreading of capitalism across the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. In this manner, the mode of production emerges
as the catalyst for all recent historical development. Within this frame-
work, Jameson describes a linear escalation of capitalist expansion, one
that permeates increasing areas of cultural and subjective experience.
While in more recent work Jameson makes a self-conscious move away
from reification theory, the concept continues to dominate his theories
of capitalism and define his periodisation of the nineteenth and twentieth
century [see 30, p. 182]. However, when looking at how these two senses
of the historical, both contradictory and linear, appear in his discussions
of nineteenth-century realism, this element of his project becomes more
multifaceted.
Across Jameson’s body of work, the nineteenth-century canon is a

witness to social change. This relationship is complicated by his need to
engage with Barthes’ critique of realist representation, however, as seen
in his discussions of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola. Jameson does not gener-
ally consider realism’s aesthetics, but rather its formal qualities. In turn,
he links these changes in form to modifications in nineteenth-century
economic activity, subjectivity and political ideologies. These kinds of
readings figure prominently in his symptomatic work, particularly in The
Political Unconscious . Here, for example, he sees Wuthering Heights ’
Heathcliff as “the locus of history in this romance: his mysterious fortune
marks him as a protocapitalist.… The aging of Heathcliff then consti-
tutes the narrative mechanism whereby the alien dynamism of capitalism is
reconciled with the immemorial (and cyclical) time of the agricultural life
of a country squiredom” [6, p. 128]. The mutations in realism in partic-
ular have a capacity to represent historical change, as best exemplified
by his preferred lineage of French authors, but also in his other interests
such as the Russian realist novel. Close readings of a text’s formal compo-
nents, seen in the context of larger formal developments and a multitude
of historical tendencies, are often at the centre of Jameson’s work on
realism. For example, he articulates his sense of the nineteenth century
as a larger period in his essay “The Realist Floor-Plan”. The essay rapidly
evokes the development of realism, capitalism and dominant philosoph-
ical tendencies in the wake of the Enlightenment. Within this narrative,
Jameson sees realism as
the literary equivalent … of what Deleuze and Guattari … called “decod-

ing”: the secularization of the older sacred codes, the systemic dissolution
of the remaining traces of the hierarchical structures which very unequally
and over many centuries characterized the organization of life and prac-
tices under the ancien régime and even more distantly under feudalism
itself. The process is evidently at one with the whole philosophical
programme of secularization and modernization projected by the Enlight-
enment philosophes, who thematize it essentially in terms of the defense of
nascent science and the elimination of superstition or error, as well as the
subversion of the older forms of theological power in the church and the
monarchy. [16, p. 373]
Jameson repeats this narrative on several occasions, at a number of points

in The Political Unconscious most notably, but also in Marxism and
Form and essays such as “Modernism and Imperialism” (1990). In these
60 J. COGLE
moments, he characterises nineteenth-century literature in terms of its

relationship to a developing capitalism, the reworking of older cultural
modes and the retraining of human subjectivity.
Criticism of Jameson’s work has often focused on periodisation and
his tendency to generalise. As Evan Watkins asserts, “Jameson general-
izes, inveterately and persistently”, and this component is problematic for
a number of detractors [11, p. 17]. Haynes Horne describes Jameson’s
periodising as remaining “squarely within the modern, the millenarian,
manifesting the desire to represent as whole that which can only be known
in shards” [31, p. 269]. R. Radhakrishnan claims, “Jameson merely asserts
his bias when he argues for the anterior reality of the totality.… He thus
negates the very possibility, epistemic, theoretical, and historical, of de-
totalized visions of accounting for reality” [32, p. 313]. In The Political
Unconscious , however, Jameson asserts “history is not a text, not a narra-
tive, master or otherwise, but that as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to
us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real
itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativiza-
tion in the political unconscious” [6, p. 34]. Horne argues against this
conception of history because it is both nostalgic and involves notions of
the meta-narrative disavowed by theorists such as Lyotard. For Jameson,
however, narrativisation, generalisation and periodisation are problem-
atic but unavoidable at the same time. He is also highly aware of the
poststructuralist stance Horne and others have taken in response to his
work. As Sean Homer has discussed, “Jameson’s theoretical wager was
to present a version of Marxism which was at once open to the plurality
of the new theoretical climate and at the same time able to maintain the
priority of Marxist interpretation” [33, p. 38]. Indeed, in The Political
Unconscious , he attempts to move outwards from this position, while still
incorporating a number of poststructuralist ideas. For Jameson, history is
decidedly non-linear, an absent cause and a totality we cannot perceive,
yet we are confined within a series of linear narratives that are our only
way of accessing history.3
While his sweeping depictions of the modernisation process remain
disputed in criticisms of his work, Jameson’s language also works to
complicate realism’s position within this narrative. He characteristically
qualifies his portrayals of the nineteenth century in “The Realist Floor-
Plan” by framing them within a rubric of contingency in the opening
sentence: “the hypothesis to be tested in the following essay is a concep-
tion of the moment of novelistic ‘realism’ as the literary equivalent …
of what Deleuze and Guattari … call ‘decoding’” [16, p. 373]. Even if

his assertions about the period, in this essay and elsewhere, appear in
the text as unproblematic and somewhat factual, Jameson often warily
inserts phrases that limit these claims to provisional sets of terms, point to
their theoretical difficulties, or frames them as if they are generally agreed
upon notions in a wider discourse about realism. This tendency increases
substantially in his later material—particularly in A Singular Modernity,
or The Antinomies of Realism—where these types of sub-clauses or qual-
ifying statements achieve a kind of ironic humour. At the same time, this
has often led to the sense that critics of Jameson commonly discuss his
work in only partial terms, or disregard the more nuanced aspects of his
arguments.
In other instances, this historical narrative achieves a type of post-
structuralist complexity through Jameson’s sense of superstructure and
mode of production. For example, in The Political Unconscious he denies
that analysis looking primarily at modes of production “will tend toward
a purely typological or classificatory operation” [6, p. 93]. Instead,
his discussion of modes of production describes a state of “permanent
cultural revolution”, whereby the
moment in which a new systemic dominant gains ascendency is … only the

diachronic manifestation of a constant struggle for the perpetuation … of
its dominance, a struggle which must continue throughout its life course,
accompanied at all moments by the systemic … antagonism of those older
and newer modes of production that resist assimilation or seek deliverance
from it. [6, p. 97]
The readings of Joseph Conrad in The Political Unconscious set out to

demonstrate this sense of history, with the author positioned between the
two literary modes, and a multitude of historical tendencies. For Jameson,
Conrad’s “place is still unstable … and his work unclassifiable, spilling
out of high literature into light reading and romance.… In Conrad
we can sense the emergence not merely of what will be contemporary
modernism (itself now become a literary institution), but also, tangibly
juxtaposed with it, of what will variously be called popular culture or
mass culture” [6, p. 206]. Here, the romantic or melodramatic elements
of Conrad are symptomatic of the movement from realism to modernism
but also new mass-cultural forms. At the same time, this larger narrative
incorporates several smaller cultural tendencies that complicate Conrad’s
62 J. COGLE
position. Jameson sees religion, labour, collectivity and the use of the sea
as a strategy of containment as formal solutions to varying elements of
Conrad’s narratives, but also as reactions to a variety of social factors.
Conrad’s moment in history is one of a number of complexities, in terms
of both the novel’s generic makeup and the development of capitalism,
as well as the way in which the cultural relates to the economic. In these
moments, Jameson accentuates the variability of these interactions.
At the same time, the integration of this model with larger histor-
ical trajectories leads to a reinstatement of a linear narrative. At the
base of Jameson’s reading of Conrad is a narrative of cultural degra-
dation, whereby “the burden of our reading of Lord Jim has been to
restore the whole socially concrete subtext of late nineteenth-century
rationalization and reification of which this novel is so powerfully …
the expression and the Utopian compensation alike” [6, p. 266]. The
relationships Jameson describes between the nineteenth century and the
following periods of modernism and late capitalism inscribe a narrative
of increased fragmentation, one that progresses without much sign of
the contradictory and antagonistic. Even if we find this narrative to be
self-evident or predominantly true, Jameson leaves us with a number
of interesting exclusions. For instance, he has only briefly mentioned
Russia’s political context in discussing Tolstoy. Jameson goes as far as
to diminish the importance of the socialist revolution in relation to his
model for historical change. In Marxism and Form, he claims, “at the
time of Balzac such forces are those of beginning capitalism, but the
nature of the forces is not itself so important: for in another situation,
Tolstoy’s literary vitality comes from the existence in Russian society of
the rising class of peasantry … whose presence gives him a strength inac-
cessible to his Western contemporaries” [7, p. 204]. It is also curious that
the insistence on the linear discounts varying political developments in
nineteenth-century France. Jameson briefly states “one would be able to
correlate the emotional content of Flaubert’s novels with the social and
political climate of France after the failure of the Revolution of 1848” [6,
p. 385]. Nevertheless, he does not see the works of Flaubert and Balzac in
relation to these convoluted political upheavals. Instead, Jameson focuses
on increasing industrial and economic development. This is in spite of the
amount of material he has dedicated to his three major realist authors, or
Lukacs’ sense that the “economic and cultural life of the entire nation
was disrupted by the huge, rapidly successive changes of the period” [34,
p. 24]. One exception remains in Jameson’s discussion of Balzac’s novel

La Rabouilleuse:
Philippe, capable of dealing with personal adversaries of his own stamp, is

disarmed before the new and impersonal forces of nascent capitalism, and
finds himself relieved of his fortune and worldly station … by the turn
of events of July 1830, but above all, by the great banker-villains of the
financial monarchy of Louis-Philippe: the Restoration will thus have been
a transitional age between the personal energies of the Napoleonic era and
the new financial power system of the July Monarchy. So it is that in one
of those prophetic episodes in which Balzac’s novels are so rich, the former
colonel of the Empire ends his life in a new kind of war, at the very frontier
of a new kind of empire, during the campaign to seize Algeria from the
Bey. [20, p. 65]
Here, Jameson once again avoids discussing the direct impingement of

other modes of production on capitalism, as in the example of Tolstoy.
Instead, the intensification of reification comes to dominate, and Jameson
does not discuss tension between the French Revolution, the Restoration
and the July Monarchy—which otherwise would seem to exemplify his
notion of historical development as site of conflict and mediation.
At the same time as he characterises the nineteenth century as one of
immense change, Jameson instates a sense of “the everyday” as becoming
the dominant category of both our literature and our experience of
society. In The Antinomies of Realism, he claims, “the nineteenth century,
indeed, may be characterized as the era of the triumph of everyday life,
and of the hegemony of its categories everywhere, over the rarer and more
exceptional moments of deeds and ‘extreme situations’” [12, p. 109].
In this regard, Conrad’s position between two modes of both litera-
ture and capitalism allows Jameson to give such a revelatory reading
of the author’s historical position. For example, the reading of Gissing
in The Political Unconscious does not have the amount of detail and
complexity found in the later Conrad section, apparently due to the
authors’ respective moments in history and the velocity of their change.
As Jameson states at the beginning of his chapter on Conrad, “the
paradigm of formal history which must now be presupposed is thus
evidently more complex than the framework of a movement from Balza-
cian realism to high realism with which we have previously worked” [6,
p. 207]. Here, the relationship between strong readings and Jameson’s
“properly historical” methodology becomes difficult. In this manner, we
64 J. COGLE
might relate the fatigue that critics have expressed in regard to symp-
tomatic reading with the possibility for new and engaging readings in this
mode. While, for the committed Marxist, academic trends should not
exhaust Jameson’s theoretical potential, one wonders how this model can
continue to generate work perpetually, as Jameson exhorts when asserting
his model for critique as pre-eminent in The Political Unconscious .
In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson will go some way to absolve
this problem. The text focuses on a linear narrative of development in
the realist novel, across a somewhat limited time frame, and extrapo-
lates one central thesis—that of the increasing dominance of affect in the
novel—into a multitude of areas. For Jameson, the introduction of affect
influences realism in terms of character systems, the function of descrip-
tion and symbolism, the nature of villains, and the level at which emotion
is described and experienced. In focusing largely on formal development,
he is able to display an overarching historical tendency, but also the many
ways in which novels integrate this change. These considerations of form
also allow Jameson to discuss other notions of transformation in the nine-
teenth century: consciousness, morality, and alienation, amongst others.
His focus remains predominantly on development, however, and once he
has positioned certain texts as crucial modulations to the novel’s form, he
rarely discusses still existing, residual examples of those earlier tendencies.
Jameson’s lengthy career has seen the theorist move through two differing
historical periods himself. His training takes place in traditional compar-
ative literature departments, while his early work is published in a period
dominated by New Criticism. Jameson’s rise to prominence, on the other
hand, takes place as another moment is starting to take hold, one highly
indebted to poststructuralism, but also defined by a variety of theories of
identity. While his readings of postmodern and even modern texts have
often remained atypical, his relationship to realism is one more defined
by that earlier academic mode and has seen his work retain certain tradi-
tional elements. At the same time, his parameters for discussing these texts
have remained somewhat fluid. The Antinomies of Realism sees Jameson
remain committed to select ideas of genre, subjectivity and reification, but
also self-reflexive enough to allow these terms to shift and evolve. While
his textual examples only differ in minor ways to his early, inherited sense
of the canon, the ways in which these texts fit into a broader sense of
the nineteenth century, and a growing sense of its literature, has widened
significantly.
The Antinomies of Realism, Everyday

Experience and Narratives of Affect
While we can point to The Antinomies of Realism’s increased nuance
in terms of historical development and genre—two large categories
throughout Jameson’s career—this book must also consider the emer-
gence of a major new category within his literary engagement: that of
affect. In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson traces “the two chrono-
logical end points of realism: its genealogy in storytelling and the tale,
[and] its future dissolution in the literary representation of affect” [12,
p. 10]. In doing so, he provides an overarching narrative for the devel-
opment of the realist novel in the nineteenth century. For Jameson, the
novel’s increased focus on representations of affect is intrinsically linked
to modifications in the realist form. The novel becomes less interested in
notions of plot and begins to concentrate on complex subjective expe-
riences. In The Antinomies of Realism Jameson allows affect to remain
fairly slippery, associating the term with “unnamed emotion”, “bodily
sensation” or “intensities” [12, p. 44]. Most explicitly, he contrasts the
novels of Balzac with those of Zola to delineate his sense of affect in
the realist novel. Jameson claims, “In Balzac everything that looks like a
physical sensation—a musty smell, a rancid taste, a greasy fabric—always
means something, it is a sign or allegory of the moral or social status of
a given character: decent poverty, squalor … the true nobility of the old
aristocracy, and so on. In short, it is not really a sensation, it is already
a meaning, an allegory” [12, p. 33]. In comparison, Jameson portrays
Zola’s lengthy descriptive sections as representations of affect without
any intended allegorical or symbolic intent. For Jameson, Zola’s work
generates a “pullulation in which the simplicity of words and names is
unsettled … by the visual multiplicity of the things themselves and the
sensations that they press on the … observer.… The realm of the visual
begins to separate from that of the verbal and conceptual and to float
away in a new kind of autonomy. Precisely this autonomy will create
the space for affect” [12, pp. 54–55]. Throughout The Antinomies of
Realism, Jameson concentrates on this “space for affect” and the modifi-
cations to the realist novel that allow for this shift in focus. In one chapter,
for example, he discusses the prevalence of the network novel—one that
sees a shift towards secondary characters at the expense of central protag-
onists—and argues that this kind of formal mutation differentiates realism
66 J. COGLE
from earlier literary modes. For Jameson, the large casts of minor charac-
ters in works by George Eliot, Benito Pérez Galdós and others shift “the
reader’s attention from the plotline to the immediacy of the characters’
encounters with each other” [12, p. 98]. In doing so, Jameson charac-
terises the nineteenth-century novel as focused on bourgeois everyday life
and moving away from “more exceptional moments of heroic deeds and
‘extreme situations’”.
Jameson’s positioning of “affect” as central to The Antinomies of
Realism is timely. Throughout his career, he has commonly pitched his
work as an intervention in contemporary debates. The Political Uncon-
scious , for example, engages with the poststructuralist theory that was
gaining influence in the United States at the time. In doing so, Jameson
made his argument for Marxist analysis more relevant to a broader
academic audience. The book would have an enduring influence, particu-
larly on symptomatic readings of literature, in the decades that followed.
Similarly, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”
works to connect the aesthetics of postmodernism with the historical
development of late capitalism, claiming the social and economic changes
in the period had a direct impact on is cultural forms. “Postmodernism”
continues to influence scholarly discussion of both the late twentieth
century and our contemporary moment. Jameson’s appropriation of affect
in The Antinomies of Realism appears to be similarly shrewd, given the
importance of affect theory in literary studies in the decade leading up to
its publication. This sense is complicated, however, by Jameson’s work to
distance his text from well-known examples of affect theory. He makes
only glancing references to the area of study, describing affect as “a tech-
nical term which has been strongly associated with a number of recent
theories which alternately appeal to Freud or to Deleuze” [12, p. 28].
Jameson mentions Sedgwick, Ngai and Flatley in a footnote, seeing them
as somewhat illustrative of work in the area [see 12, p. 28n4]. He does
not engage with them any further, however, instead claiming, “I want
to specify a very local and restricted practical use of the term ‘affect’
here” [12, pp. 28–29]. Elsewhere he cites Teresa Brennan and Rei Terada,
but only briefly. Even as he seeks to distance The Antinomies of Realism
from this broader discussion, however, Jameson’s text inevitably reframes
our understanding of affect theory as it provides a historical account of
nineteenth-century literature that positions representations of affective
experience as essential to its development.
Jameson’s discussion of affect throughout his career also compli-

cates this more recent use of the term. For example, in “The Realist
Floor-Plan”, he discusses Flaubert while using similar concepts of the
“everyday”. The article spends more time, however, connecting the stan-
dardisation of bourgeois life with broader structural change across the
nineteenth century. Jameson outlines
a new form of space, whose homogeneity abolishes the old heterogeneities

of various forms of sacred space—transforming a whole world of qualities
and libidinal intensities into the merely psychological experiences of what
Descartes called “secondary sensations,” and setting in their place the grey
world of quantity and extension, of the purely measurable—together with
the substitution of the older forms of ritual, sacred or cyclical time by the
new physical and measurable temporality of the clock and routine, of the
working day. [16, p. 374]
The focus of the piece is Flaubert’s short story “A Simple Heart” (1877).
As discussed above, the story is also the subject of Roland Barthes’
his well-known essay “L’effet de réel ”. Jameson allows Barthes’ point
regarding the short story’s description of a bourgeois home and its
construction of realism: “The house itself is a pretext, and in that sense
Barthes was not wrong to isolate a detail from this paragraph as his central
illusion for what he calls ‘l’effet de réel ,’ a purely connotative function in
which a wealth of contingent details—without any symbolic meaning—
emit the signal, ‘this is reality,’ or better still, ‘this is realism’” [16, p. 376].
Jameson nevertheless argues against Barthes by characterising the descrip-
tive passages of “A Simple Heart” as engaging directly with the sense
of reification as outlined above. Jameson claims that Flaubert’s story is
unable to “recentre space, to stem the serial flight of infinite divisibility,
to pull back the contents of the room into a genuine centered hierar-
chy” 16, p. 379]. Within this new sense of reified domestic space, a
different kind of subjectivity emerges, one where affect becomes more
dominant. Jameson emphasises the conclusion to the paragraph, which
notes the room’s mustiness. For Jameson this is “the only concrete prac-
tice of perception still feebly surviving in a new odourless and qualityless
universe.… This sudden … burst of ‘affect’ announces the fitful emer-
gence of the subject in Flaubert’s text: the ‘musty smell’ inscribing … the
place of subjectivity in a henceforth reified universe” [16, p. 380]. This
discussion aligns very closely with The Antinomies of Realism, but makes
68 J. COGLE
an explicit connection between representations of bourgeois experience

and the historical process of reification that overtakes both subjective
experience and the domestic spaces we inhabit.
In “Postmodernism”, Jameson also discusses the everyday and affect.
Under late capitalism, he sees an increased sense of social and political
inertness whereby everyday life has become an “eternal present”. In the
essay, he also coins the well-known phrase “waning of affect”, claiming:
The end of the bourgeois ego … brings with it the end of the
psychopathologies of that ego—what I have been calling the waning of
affect.… This is not to say that the cultural products of the postmodern
era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings—which it
may be better … following J.-F. Lyotard, to call “intensities”—are now
free-floating and impersonal. [18, pp. 15–16]
Influential affect theorists have frequently commented on this phrase,

including Lawrence Grossberg and Brian Massumi. In “The Autonomy
of Affect” (1995), Massumi writes, “there seems to be a growing feeling
within … theory that affect is central to an understanding of our … late-
capitalist culture.… Fredric Jameson notwithstanding, belief has waned
for many, but not affect. If anything, our condition is characterized
by a surfeit of it. The problem is that there is no cultural-theoretical
vocabulary specific to affect” [35, p. 88]. Massumi’s essay nevertheless
contributes to this issue of vocabulary when he uses affect and inten-
sities interchangeably. For example, in the essay Massumi states “for
present purposes, intensity will be equated with affect” [35, p. 88].
He does not, however, acknowledge Jameson’s differing glossing of the
terms in this context. Given the emphasis Jameson places on “intensities”
in his depiction of postmodernity, Massumi’s comment seems some-
what misleading. Further to this, Massumi mentions the phrase “waning
of affect” without engaging with the surrounding context Jameson is
working within. Crucially, Jameson uses the term affect in “Postmod-
ernism” in a different fashion to that commonly found in later affect
theory. For example, Jameson references Edvard Munch’s The Scream
(1893) to discuss affect. He states that the painting is “a canonical expres-
sion of the great modernist thematics of alienation … social fragmentation
and isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called
the age of anxiety. It will be here read as an embodiment … of the
expression of that kind of affect” [18, p. 11]. Further to this, Jameson
makes the argument about a waning of affect in a broader discussion of

affective investment in specific texts. He notes how audience engagement
differs between a work like The Scream and something like Andy Warhol’s
Diamond Dust Shoes . He connects this changing relationship to cultural
material to the “emotional ground-tone” of postmodernity.
The brief discussion of affect found in “Postmodernism” also has
a very different focus to the more specific conceptualisations found in
Sedgwick’s influential essays. Collected in Touching Feeling: Affect, Peda-
gogy, Performativity (2003), Sedgwick’s early work on affect predom-
inantly focuses on intersections of physical experience, cognition and
psychology—as well as the complex interplay between subjectivity, perfor-
mativity and culture. For example, Sedgwick focuses on the affect
of shame and engages specifically with affect theorist Silvan Tomp-
kins and psychologist Michael Franz Basch. Sedgwick claims “shame is
the affect that mantles the threshold between introversion and extro-
version, between absorption and theatricality, between performativity
and—performativity” [27, p. 38]. She analyses both the fiction and theo-
retical work of Henry James through this particular lens, aiming to “offer
some psychological, phenomenological, thematic density and motivation
to what I [describe] … as the ‘torsions’ or aberrances between refer-
ence and performativity, or indeed between queerness and other ways
of experiencing identity and desire” [27, p. 62]. In this work, Sedg-
wick mentions Jameson occasionally. Her criticism of “paranoid reading”
implicitly includes Jameson’s famous directives for interpretation found
in The Political Unconscious . The title of her famous essay “Paranoid
Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably
Think This Essay Is About You” notably references Jameson’s “Post-
modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. Sedgwick’s essay
places several interpretive practices in a broader trend of “hermeneutics of
suspicion”. Within this framework, Jameson’s Marxist symptomatic read-
ings of texts stand as definitive examples of this tendency. Sedgwick states
that the imperative for a hermeneutics of suspicion had “taken on some-
thing of the sacred status as Fredric Jameson’s ‘Always historicize’.…
Always historicize? What could have less to do with historicizing than
the commanding, atemporal verb ‘always’? … The imperative framing
will do funny things to a hermeneutics of suspicion” [27, p. 125]. In
the essay, Sedgwick does not discuss Jameson at length, instead going on
to focus on Judith Butler and D. A. Miller. Using Tompkins’ concept
70 J. COGLE
of paranoia as a “theory of negative affect”, Sedgwick analyses the well-

known interpretive practices of both scholars [27, p. 145]. In doing so,
Sedgwick warns against paranoia’s “strong” or contagious qualities in crit-
ical work: “As strong theory … paranoia is nothing if not teachable.
The powerfully ranging and reductive force of strong theory can make
tautological thinking hard to identify even as it makes it compelling and
near inevitable; the result is that both writers and readers can damagingly
misrecognize whether and where real conceptual work is getting done”
[27, p. 136]. This critique of hermeneutics of suspicion has had broad
impact. For example, in Ugly Feelings, Ngai discusses the affect of para-
noia and focuses on Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and
Space in the World System (1992). She argues that, in analysing 1970s
conspiracy films, the text takes on a similarly paranoid world view, one that
is necessarily male: “‘Conspiracy theory’ … becomes safeguarded through
the genre of the political thriller as a distinctively male form of knowledge
production. As Jameson himself suggests … the male conspiracy theorist
seems to have become an exemplary model for the late twentieth-century
theorist in general, and conspiracy theory a viable synecdoche for ‘the-
ory’ itself” [28, p. 299]. We might align both Ngai and Sedgwick with
a broader move towards “surface reading” within literary studies, which
has often positioned itself in contrast to Jameson’s most influential work.
While not often explicitly engaging with this kind of criticism, Jameson
has commonly made subtle changes to his terminology or made efforts
to reposition earlier work. In The Antinomies of Realism, for example,
he discusses his earlier essays on postmodern experience, but shifts the
focus to temporality. In doing so, he significantly revises his notion of a
waning of affect: “the contemporary or postmodern ‘perpetual present’
is better characterized as a ‘reduction to the body,’ in as much as the
body is all that remains in any tendential reduction of experience to the
present as such.… The isolated body begins to know more global waves
of generalized sensations, and it is these which … I will here call affect”
[12, p. 28]. Even as he attempts to realign his use of terminology with
broader discussions in affect theory, however, Jameson’s focus on tempo-
rality differentiates his work from much of the field. While he may use
affect as shorthand for “unnamed emotion”, he is more interested in
structures of perception in the bourgeois everyday. Throughout The Anti-
nomies of Realism, he refers to Zola’s descriptions of sensory overload in
crowded marketplaces, Tolstoy’s depictions of long-distance travel and its
stream of stray thoughts and emotions, and Galdós’ interest in the fleeting
impressions of acquaintances as they bump into each other in the urban

environment. When discussing Tolstoy, Jameson concentrates on Prince
Andrew’s interior experience as he travels across the country to meet a
superior. He argues:
What is thus crucial here is the changeability of the affects, which in turn
provides the registering apparatus, the legibility of the various states.…
What the chapter … demonstrates is the ceaseless variability from elation
to hostility, from sympathy to generosity … finally to disappointment and
indifference: there are in principle in Tolstoy no moments of the narrative
which lack their dimension of affect … one is tempted to say that these
movements and variations are themselves the narrative. [12, pp. 84–85]
While Sedgwick’s discussions of shame focus on specific structures of

feeling, Jameson here concentrates on temporal components of affect, as
well as the subjective and literary registering of these states. Throughout
The Antinomies of Realism, he is most interested in the way affect
becomes visible in the novel form and bourgeois experience more broadly.
From this vantage point, we might view these two differing discussions
of affect as more supplementary. Readings more interested in performa-
tivity or psychoanalytic frameworks might provide additional nuance to
Jameson’s discussions of affect in the nineteenth-century novel. Similarly,
Jameson’s notions of representation, subjectivity and the temporal rarely
become the focus of work by Sedgwick and those she influenced, but
these elements might work together to provide a more holistic picture of
affective experience.
This sense of affect’s emergence has particular relevance for work
by both Flatley and Ngai. In Flatley’s Affective Mapping (2008) and
Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, the political possibilities of affect are foregrounded
throughout. In Affective Mapping, Flatley analyses polemic political texts.
He articulates how both physical and emotional states can have specific
political connotations—as well as how collectives can be formed through
common feelings of depression or melancholy. For example, Flatley
discusses W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and the Civil
Rights movement, claiming: “The disclosure of the historicity of subjec-
tive emotional life always beckons toward a potentially political effect.
Through the articulation of a subjective experience of loss with a collec-
tive one, the affective map facilitates the transformation of a depressive
disengagement into an … interest in … social and political histories”
72 J. COGLE
[36, p. 106]. In doing so, Flatley claims that affect has the capacity
to be politically productive. Ngai argues similarly for the potential of
collective identities to be forged through shared affective experiences.
Through discussing envy in the film Single White Female (1992), Ngai
argues for the importance of “bad exemplarity”: “the film mobilizes
envy to demonstrate the capacity of female subjects to form coalitions
based on something other than ‘similar love for the same object,’ to
emulate attributes without identifying with them, and to function as
examples that do not properly exemplify, actively defining and redefining
the category they would seem only to passively reflect” [28, p. 168].
Through reclaiming broad cultural understandings of envy, Ngai is able to
provide a new model for collectivity and argues for its potential political
effectiveness. For both Flatley and Ngai, collective experiences of affect
offer strategies for productivity in a hegemonic and reified contemporary
situation.
This work might seem to sit in opposition to Jameson, who has seen
affect as symptomatic of these same notions of hegemony and reification
as they emerge and develop under capitalism. In certain later examples
of his work, however, Jameson also engages with notions of collectivity
that we might align with Flatley and Ngai. In “Symptoms of Theory, or
Symptoms for Theory?” (2004), for example, Jameson outlines the devel-
opment of critical theory and forecasts “a fourth moment for theory,
as yet on the other side of the horizon. This one has to do with the
theorizing of collective subjectivities, although, because it does not yet
theoretically exist, all the words I can find for it are still the old-fashioned
and discredited ones, such as the project of a social psychology” [37,
p. 406]. Jameson has commonly referred to a notion of collectivity in his
work on utopian thought. In Archaeologies of the Future, for example,
he claims, “insofar as our own society has trained us to believe that
true disalienation or authenticity only exists in the private or individual
realm, it may well be this revelation of collective solidarity which is the
freshest one and the most startlingly and overtly Utopian” [23, p. 230].
Jameson has also frequently concentrated on how cultural forms develop
and perpetuate throughout history. In “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying
the Ideology of Modernism” (1975), he notes the “essential portability
of all literary language. So what we want to ask ourselves first and fore-
most is not whether the work of art is or is not autonomous, but rather,
how it gets to be autonomous; how language … manages … to orga-
nize itself into relatively self-sufficient bodies of words which can then be
grasped by groups and individuals” [30, p. 415]. As such, we might align

Jameson’s work with Flatley’s notions of affective mapping. Similarly, we
could argue that both Flatley and Ngai have begun the work of conceptu-
alising the “collective subjectivities” that Jameson sees as necessary. These
overlapping notions of collectivity, autonomy and portability all suggest
possibilities for social change and for working against an over-determined
sense of reification in late capitalism. If affect within this framework has
the capacity to be both productive and limiting, then a more thorough
delineation of affective experience and capitalist standardisation seems
necessary.
In The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson refrains from discussing
broader political contexts in any real depth. He predominantly moves
away from symptomatic readings of nineteenth-century novel. This move
is similar the slight changes to terminology regarding postmodernity
and affect: he makes subtle manoeuvres that better align his work with
contemporary discussion, but does not engage with criticism explicitly.
He relates his analyses of the nineteenth-century novel with contem-
poraneous developments in western capitalism, but only in an indirect
fashion. The scenes he chooses to reference from Tolstoy, Zola and others
are often set in marketplaces or bureaucratic offices. Others take place
in the kind of domestic environment that have lost a traditional sense
of meaning, as discussed in “The Realist Floor-Plan”. This earlier essay
connects the relationships between these differing elements of Jameson’s
theoretical framework and The Antinomies of Realism’s focus on affect.
As mentioned above, in “The Realist Floor-Plan” he relates Flaubert’s
depictions of domestic interiors to the transformation of space under
capitalism. Further to this, Jameson claims that novelists provide a key
function in this process: “if we pause to interrogate the function of the
writers and the artists of this transitional period.… The artists also are
to be seen as ideologues … their service to ideology in the vastest sense
of daily practices is … the production of a whole new world—on the
level of the symbolic and imaginary” [16, pp. 373–374]. While Jameson’s
discussion of realism might align with these broader notions of social
and political development, he does not discuss these at length in The
Antinomies of Realism. The text refrains from thoroughly articulating
the relationship between changes to the form of the nineteenth-century
novel and modernism’s reification of everyday experience. Jameson also
74 J. COGLE
steers away from discussing how the portability of the novel creates affec-
tive communities, and how these communities figure in that narrative of
reification and standardisation.
Flatley and Ngai occasionally mention broader historical contexts in
their work on affect. They do not, however, discuss these contexts in
detail. In Ugly Feelings, Ngai focuses on a diverse group of texts: along-
side Single White Female, she discusses Herman Melville’s The Confidence
Man (1857) and Nella Larson’s Quicksand (1928). Early in the book,
Ngai states she aims to present “a series of studies in the aesthetics
of negative emotions, examining their politically ambiguous work in a
range of cultural artifacts produced in … the fully ‘administered world’
of late modernity” [28, p. 1]. Nevertheless, she does not work to situate
these varied texts in their historical moments, only briefly considering the
connection between a fully administered everyday and the potential—or
lack thereof—of certain affective experiences. In a similar fashion, Flatley
argues that shared affective states can help to stimulate collective action.
As mentioned above, Flatley outlines a history of African American polit-
ical action by discussing the Sorrow Song, which has impact on both W.
E. B. Du Bois and the later Civil Rights movement:
because the singers know the songs will be repeated and because they know
they will leave their traces in the songs, the songs afford them the ability to
see themselves from the point of view of collective remembrance.… The
songs … provide a nugget of affective experience for the audience, and
then tell the audience how and why that experience is valuable, interesting,
historically and politically relevant. This is the moment of what I have been
calling affective mapping. [36, p. 153]
This work does not, however, consider a sense of political possibility.

Flatley states that “the political potential of the affective map can lie
nascent and unrealized in … aesthetic practice, waiting for an audience
to take it up. The affective map must be met by the right circumstances
for it to have actual galvanizing, transformative, collectively experienced
effects” [36, p. 106]. Flatley does not expand further on the changing
social, cultural or economic conditions that might allow for these affective
communities to move towards collective action and be politically effective.
Even if Flatley aims to avoid an account of this movement that is overde-
termined, it remains that a thorough account of the historical situation in
which the texts operate would add further nuance to his broader discus-
sion. Through such an account, we may arrive at a stronger articulation
of the relationship between the reified everyday and politically productive
notions of affect.
Throughout The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson resists connecting
his historical view of affect in literature to a broader sense of cultural
development. In doing so, he perhaps aims to avoid criticism that his
work is overly dependent on paranoid or symptomatic analysis. If we
refer back to “The Realist Floor-Plan”, however, we are provided with
a framework for social and cultural change that integrates his sense of
affect in the realist form. This framework provides an opportunity to
broaden some of the narrow focus of The Antinomies of Realism, as
well as some of Jameson’s other brief engagements with the term affect.
Similarly, scholarly work that concentrates on the cultural, performa-
tive and cognitive aspects of affect could stand to engage with some
elements of Jameson’s “local and restricted” sense of affect. He aims to
delineate certain temporal aspects of subjectivity and consciousness, as
well as underlying structures of perception, which could be complemen-
tary to affect theory that instead concentrates on structures of feeling.
Work that aims to sketch affective maps in a more detailed and multi-
faceted fashion might gain from integrating these differing components
of subjective experience. Meanwhile, the politically informed aspects of
work by Flatley and Ngai would be enhanced by engaging with Jameson’s
sense of an emergence of affect in literary history. In The Antinomies
of Realism, it can seem that he purposely avoids contemporary crit-
ical discussion. Despite his imperative to distance the text from broader
discussions in affect theory, however, Jameson’s work might productively
engage with these discussions. While alterations to terminology and shifts
in interpretive focus over the course of his career might require some
unpacking, Jameson’s work provides a framework for understanding how
affect emerges alongside capitalist reification of everyday experience—
and whether affect has any capacity to combat this ongoing historical
situation.
Notes
1. The article also contains work on psychoanalysis and Lacan that Jameson
will excise in The Political Unconscious . Jameson wrote the article before the
English translation of Deleuze and Guitarri’s Anti-Oedipus was published,
76 J. COGLE
which has a noticeable influence on Jameson’s book. It is possible that

Jameson had read the original French publication by this time, but the
text does not figure in this essay. While Jameson has since incorporated a
number of psychoanalytic elements across his career, he has often done so
in a partial or sceptical manner.
2. We can see Jameson’s insistence on the French terminology over “free
indirect discourse” as reflecting his sense that Flaubert’s makes the most
important contribution to this development in literature.
3. Critics such as Radhakrishnan have remained sceptical of Jameson’s
attempts in this vein and of the ability of Marxist and poststructuralist
theory to be reconciled in general. We can perhaps see the difference
in terms of Jameson’s investment in the worth of macropolitics, while
Radhakrishnan remains committed to a micropolitics of difference.
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421141.
CHAPTER 3
Jameson and the High-Modernist Novel:

Absence, Imperialism and Metacommentaries
Usefully Ambiguous Modernism

Nineteenth-century realism is a major focus for Jameson and emphasises
the importance of the novel form to his theoretical project. The modernist
literature of the early twentieth century, on the other hand, occupies
a more uncertain position. In “Postmodern Jameson” (1989), Martin
Donougho states that Jameson “never treats modernism directly….
Modernism is the absent center of his project” [1, p. 81]. This is
true of the most visible material Jameson had produced at the time
of Donougho’s writing. The Political Unconscious (1981), for example,
describes literary and economic changes leading up to the early twen-
tieth century, but its purview ends with the “emergent modernism” of
Joseph Conrad. Jameson’s early material on postmodernism, meanwhile,
only briefly attempts to describe the preceding historical moment, most
famously in a reading of Vincent van Gogh’s A Pair of Boots (1887) [see
2, pp. 6–16]. The sense that modernism remains obscured in Jameson’s
treatment of literary history persists in his later work, as well as in contem-
porary critical attention. Philip E. Wegner has more recently claimed:
“both the central object and the very condition of possibility of his
research agenda, [modernism] vanishes when we attempt to bring it to
the center of our intellectual attention” [3, p. 254]. In The Antinomies
of Realism (2013), meanwhile, Jameson posits high modernism as an end
point for his historical narrative—the moment in literature’s development

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54824-7_3
80 J. COGLE
where representations of affect become dominant over earlier storytelling

impulses—but avoids describing the situation in detail.
Such a portrayal of Jameson is complicated, however, by overt consid-
erations of modernism found in works such as Fables of Aggression
(1979), A Singular Modernity (2002) and The Modernist Papers (2007).
As the collected essays in The Modernist Papers attest, he has discussed
modernist authors, poets and painters throughout his career, particularly
across the 1980s and 1990s. Nevertheless, in comparison with Jameson’s
most influential work, this material on the modern has had a consistently
minor impact. Fables of Aggression, for example, “remains the only one
of Jameson’s books to be out of print for any extended period” and
is often overlooked by scholars [4, p. 185]. Similarly, pieces such as
“Ulysses in History” (1982) have appeared in less visible avenues than
Jameson’s contemporaneous essays on postmodernism, such as “Post-
modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. In conjunction,
his work on high modernism has often drawn back from the broader
claims found in his most famous contributions to the critical landscape.
A Singular Modernity, for instance, discusses the difficulty of articu-
lating modernism in any satisfactory sense. In the work, Jameson states
he will be “concerned to denounce the sterility of the standard aesthetic
move, which consists in isolating ‘modernism’ as a standard by which
to compare a whole series of historically and artistically incomparable
writers (or painters or musicians)” [5, p. 28]. We could describe these
aspects of Jameson’s interaction with modernism as deliberate, echoing
his sense of “Habermas’s brilliant formula of an incomplete modernity, of
‘modernity as an unfinished project’” [5, p. 11]. For Jameson, “Haber-
mas’s formula remains usefully ambiguous, and allows one to entertain
the possibility that modernity is incomplete because it could never be
completed by the middle class and its economic system” [5, p. 11].
This view of an incomplete modernism has become an integral compo-
nent of Jameson’s work. As Alexander Dunst claims in a review of The
Modernist Papers , the “interpretation of the modernist text as a necessary
failure—the impossibility of an absolute separation of language and narra-
tive from reference—has been a staple of Jameson’s criticism for decades”
[6, p. 120].
Within this context, critics have also painted Jameson himself as a thor-
oughly modernist figure. Philip E. Wegner, for instance, sees The Political
Unconscious as a paradigmatic example of “theoretical modernism” and
reads the text in terms of modernist form [see 4, pp. 43–59]. Work
3 JAMESON AND THE HIGH-MODERNIST NOVEL … 81
that comments on Jameson’s supposed nostalgia has also often framed

his project as modernist. Haynes Horne, for example, states: “Jameson’s
work stands as a fascinating instance of a ‘late’ modernism, for where
it is unavoidable … it incorporates poststructuralist elements piecemeal
and strategically; but in its cognitive-theoretical underpinnings, Jameson’s
work continues to posit, finally, a modernist commitment to totality not
unlike other enlightenment projects before it” [7, pp. 268–269]. Jameson
himself has claimed, “I’m a person of the 1950s rather than the 1960s”
when noting his slight remove from the moment of postmodernism [8,
p. 120]. In this regard, we might align his project with his own sense
of late modernism, which is derived somewhat from Charles Jencks. In
Postmodernism, Jameson claims “Jencks’s late moderns are those who
persist into postmodernism, and the idea makes sense architecturally; a
literary frame of reference, however, throws up names like Borges and
Nabokov, Beckett … who had the misfortune to span two eras and the
luck to find a time capsule of isolation or exile in which to spin out
unseasonable forms” [2, p. 305]. Within this complex sense of Jameson’s
interaction with modernism, literature occupies an equally ambiguous
position. He often depicts high-modernist novels as closely linked to the
tensions and ideologies of the period, but the mediatory relationships
remain unclear. For Jameson, realist literature has a privileged relationship
to the world it portrays, and a role to play in the recoding of Western
subjective experience. Nevertheless, in texts such as The Antinomies of
Realism, he discusses the aesthetics and politics of realist authors with
a critical distance. In his work on high modernism, however, Jameson
closely connects the artistic goals and ideologies of its literary proponents
with contemporary developments in capitalist society. His tendency to
partially articulate modernism contributes to the obscurity of these rela-
tionships. Across this chapter, it will be necessary to discuss his sense of
the period in detail, in order to better locate literature’s position within
Jameson’s delineation of broader, often more global changes.
Despite the uncertain position the period regularly occupies within his
larger project, Jameson sees modernism as an important component of his
work, from Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961) onwards. In an after-
word written for the 1984 edition, he claims that the text attempts to
“replace Sartre in literary history itself … between the modernist tradition
and Sartrean narrative or stylistic procedures” [9, p. 205]. The Origins of
82 J. COGLE
a Style opens with a discussion of modernist style, with Jameson char-

acteristically relating changes in cultural forms to an increasing cultural
fragmentation:
In our time, when there are no longer any self-justifying forms or any
commonly recognized literary language, the very importance of a writer’s
work comes to be dependent on what is new in it and on the sudden
appearance or absence of a style radically different from anything at that
point in existence. This increased significance of style … sets it slowly
in contradiction with the older forms, until the new ones are devised to
permit us not merely to notice the style but to direct upon it the principle
attention of our reading. And at other moments the two, the inherited
form and the style that fills it in spite of itself with more modern content,
coexist in a work that thus reflects not so much a weakness of the writer’s
talent but a new and problematic moment in his situation, a moment of
crisis in the history of the development of writing itself. [9, p. vii]
While he rarely discusses Marxist theory at this stage of his career,

Jameson connects high-modernist literature with the development of
reification in the text: “Sartre’s works face the same … aesthetic problems
that the older generation of moderns attempted to solve in a different
way: the place of chance and of facticity in the work of art, the collapse
of a single literary language, a period style, the expression of a relatively
homogeneous class, into a host of private styles and isolated points in
a fragmented society” [9, p. 205]. Despite this wide initial focus—and
the afterword’s later claims—The Origins of a Style only occasionally sees
its subject in relation to other modernist writers. James Joyce, Wyndham
Lewis and Marcel Proust make their initial appearances in Jameson’s body
of work here, but are only briefly engaged with.
In the next stage of his career, Jameson would reveal a broader
range of textual interests, particularly in terms of modernist literature.
He references Joyce, Mann and Proust throughout Marxism and Form,
but he also considers Albert Camus, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and F.
Scott Fitzgerald, amongst others. The chapter on Adorno also engages
with composers Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, with Jameson
describing an early twentieth century where “the total organization of the
economy ends up alienating the very language and thoughts of its human
population, and by dispelling the last remnant of the older autonomous
subject or ego: advertising, market research, psychological testing, and
a host of other sophisticated techniques of mystification now complete
a thorough planification of the public” [10, p. 36]. With these state-

ments, Jameson develops his notion of the modernist text as defined by
the increasing industrialisation, reification and fragmentation of Western
urban experience. At the same time, he reads modernist literature as an
often critical or utopian gesture, claiming modernism was “in its essence
profoundly antisocial, and reckoned with the instinctive hostility of the
middle-class public of which it stood as a negation and a refusal” [10,
p. 413].
Throughout the next decade, Jameson would publish several articles
engaging with modernism in some capacity. These would include: “Wyn-
dham Lewis as Futurist” (1973), “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the
Ideology of Modernism” (1975) and “Towards a Libidinal Economy of
Three Modern Painters” (1979). These articles would culminate with the
publication of Fables of Aggression, which develops the concepts discussed
in Marxism and Form: “The modernist gesture is thus ideological and
Utopian all at once: perpetuating the increasing subjectivization of indi-
vidual experience and the atomization and disintegration of the older
social communities … it also embodies a will to overcome the commod-
ification of late nineteenth-century capitalism” [11, p. 39]. Despite
often discussing prominent figures of institutional modernism, Fables
of Aggression remains one of Jameson’s least conventional texts. The
work considers the more subversive or problematic elements of the peri-
od’s literature and ideologies. For Jameson, the utopian high-modernist
gesture mirrors protofascist tendencies, which “may be characterized as
a shifting strategy of class alliances whereby an initially strong populist
and anticapitalist impulse is gradually readapted to the ideological habits
of a petty bourgeoisie” [11, p. 15]. Along with The Origins of a Style,
Fables of Aggression is one of Jameson’s few texts to focus on a single
novelist throughout. Perhaps due to the linking of modernist ideology to
fascism—or the minor popularity of Wyndham Lewis, the text’s primary
focus—the book has remained Jameson’s least discussed work. While
the narrow focus might be a contributing factor to the book’s obscu-
rity, we could also blame the text’s internal lack of cohesion, with the
work often lacking the narrative unity that Wegner sees in Marxism
and Form and The Political Unconscious . Across the text, protofascism,
fascism, Nazism, Marxism, socialism, communism, hegemonic liberalism,
naturalism, futurism, conservatism and Catholicism all emerge as possible
ideological choices for the period. In this manner, the book foregrounds a
sense of high modernity as a period of extreme flux. For Jameson, Lewis’
84 J. COGLE
rapid formal development represents a multitude of responses to a larger

problem of fragmentation, and Jameson aligns the author with a partic-
ular high modernist cohort, one comprised of “Pound, Eliot, Joyce and
Yeats” [11, p. 87].
With the publication of The Political Unconscious two years later,
Jameson began to limit his engagement with modernism in certain ways.
Within the text, for example, he creates a self-imposed boundary for
discussing the modern. He states, “after the peculiar heterogeneity of the
moment of Conrad, a high modernism is set in place which it is not the
object of this book to consider” [12, p. 280]. In the text, Jameson sees
Conrad as a transitional author, a figure who stands between the realism
of the nineteenth century and the high modernism of the early twentieth
century. As Jameson’s reading develops, Conrad’s position in the develop-
ment of literary style becomes symptomatic of the movement from market
capitalism to monopoly capitalism. Throughout, high modernism remains
largely on the periphery and only receives a brief summation. Within this
discussion, Jameson again sees high-modernist literature and visual art
as ideologically sympathetic to the reification process but also a utopian
compensation for this negative development. For Jameson:
The increasing abstraction of visual art thus proves not only to express the
abstraction of daily life and to presuppose fragmentation and reification;
it also constitutes a Utopian compensation for everything lost in … capi-
talism—the place of quality in an increasingly quantified world, the place
of the archaic and of feeling amid the desacralization of the market system,
the place of sheer color and intensity within the grayness of measurable
extension and geometrical abstraction. [12, pp. 236–237]
While elsewhere suggesting that this kind of cultural practice has political
value—offering elements of a cognitive mapping process and subverting
dominant ideologies in some manner—Jameson finishes the chapter by
claiming: “The perfected poetic apparatus of high modernism represses
History just as successfully as the perfected narrative apparatus of high
realism did the random heterogeneity of the as yet uncentered subject.
At this point, however, the political … has at last become a genuine
Unconscious” [12, p. 280]. Here Jameson locates high modernism as
the moment where the political becomes wholly repressed in literature,
even if elsewhere the utopian qualities of modernist cultural material are
reinforced.
While the passage amounts to a singular moment over a long

and highly prolific career, the claim denotes a persistent ambiguity
surrounding Jameson’s construction of modernism. Despite the consis-
tent discussion of reification and utopian response, he often allows the
period and its literature to shift within these contexts. This is particularly
evident in his work that posits modernism in relation to the histor-
ical stages of the nineteenth century and postmodernity, both of which
Jameson more explicitly defines. In “On Raymond Chandler” (1970), for
example, he loosely describes the high modernism of the United States:
“The last great period of American literature, which ran more or less from
one world war to the other, explored and defined America in geograph-
ical mode, as a sum of separate localisms” [13, pp. 68–69]. He contrasts
this moment with postmodern literature, which is given much stricter
limitations: “since the War, the organic differences from region to region
have been increasingly obliterated by standardization…. If there is a crisis
in American literature at present, it should be understood against the
background of this ungrateful social material, in which only trick shots
can produce the illusion of life” [13, p. 69]. This tendency persists and
becomes more complex with the publication of Postmodernism. The text’s
famous reading of Vincent Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Boots” and Andy
Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes” begins by declaring “A Pair of Boots”
“one of the canonical works of high modernism in visual art” [2, p. 6].
While Jameson’s sense of semi-autonomous historical development allows
for this painting from the 1890s to be seen as high modernism, various
issues still complicate the reading. The problem of repressed political
content is again insistent, as his reading of “A Pair of Boots” is highly
invested in how the work “reworks, transforms and appropriates. In Van
Gogh that content, those initial raw materials, are … to be grasped simply
as the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty,
and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a
world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized
state” [2, p. 7]. Jameson explicitly sees Van Gogh’s painting as a “utopian
gesture” that “confronts” the political as it responds to the processes of
monopoly capitalism. Warhol’s work, in contrast, has less political agency:
“the great billboard images of the … Campbell’s soup can, which explic-
itly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital,
ought to be powerful and critical political statements. If they are not that
… one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the
possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late
86 J. COGLE
capital” [2, p. 9]. Once again, while postmodern art is highly limited by
Jameson’s narrative of reification, high modernism’s attributes continue
to fluctuate.
While Jameson’s sense of the modernist period is frequently obscured
by his ambiguous engagements with modernism, his version of the
modernist canon is more obvious. Throughout his career, he repeatedly
returns to a conventional group of high-modernist texts. Short passages,
often aiming at a generalised depiction of the period, commonly list T.
S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Marcel Proust, amongst others.
Jameson portrays these authors and poets as exemplary literary figures—
representative of the age and the high-modernist form—and emphasises a
particular notion of the modernist text: difficult, experimental and adverse
to the commercial literature that it coexists with. The group also rein-
forces an almost entirely white, male and Western version of the modernist
period, one that makes only minor concessions to the broadened view of
the canon recently insisted on by varying scholarly groups. As Alexander
Dunst notes of the collected essays in The Modernist Papers:
A brief and theoretically dated consideration of the “Libidinal Economy

of Three Modern Painters” and an essay on Gertrude Stein form the only
exceptions to the masculine literary focus, and even when Jameson writes
about Japan, the writers he considers allow for no surprises: Natsume
Sōseki, often seen as the country’s foremost author of the Meiji era,
and Nobel prize winner Kenzaburo Oe…. The almost absolute exclu-
sion of women and non-Western writers would seem to point rather to
a complicity with traditional notions of the canon—an ideological forma-
tion most contemporary studies of modernism, and equally, most Marxist
criticism, would no doubt want to challenge. [6, p. 185]
While criticisms of totalisation or generalisation have persisted throughout

his career, this more specific accusation of a cultural imperialism has
become important to our current perception of Jameson. His essay
“Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986),
and Aijaz Ahmad’s famous rebuke “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and
the ‘National Allegory’” (1987) is likely the most famous controversy of
Jameson’s career. The debate has particular relevance to his discussions of
modernism, as we will see below. Firstly, however, it will be necessary to
summarise this debate and its consequences.
Jameson’s essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism” is an attempt to see regional literatures in relation to varying
histories of colonisation, as well as differing positions within contem-

porary global capitalism. For Jameson, third-world literature is able to
perform more varied operations than analogous Western material. He
argues that “one of the determinants of capitalist culture, that is, the
culture of the western realist and modernist novel, is a radical split
between the private and the public, between … the domain of sexu-
ality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the
economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud versus
Marx” [14, p. 69]. In contrast, Jameson interprets the work of two major
figures—Lu Xun from China and Ousmane Sembène from Senegal—in
order to demonstrate that “third-world texts, even those which are seem-
ingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic … necessarily
project a political dimension in the form of national allegory” [14, p. 69].
The national allegory hypothesis is also tied to Jameson’s notion of cogni-
tive mapping, whereby “what is here called ‘national allegory’ is clearly a
form of … mapping of the totality, so that the present essay … sketches a
theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature” [14, p. 88n].
Nevertheless, Jameson reinforces his position as a critic operating firmly
within a US context. As Neil Lazarus notes, Jameson originally wrote
“Third-World Literature” as a “memorial lecture at the University of Cali-
fornia, San Diego honouring Jameson’s academic colleague and friend,
Robert C. Elliot” [15, p. 55]. In the essay’s lengthy preamble—which
foregrounds the difficulty for Western readers to engage with non-
canonical texts—Jameson seems to assume that his audience is entirely
comprised of Western academics. He returns to this notion later in the
piece, where he claims:
Any articulation of radical difference … is susceptible to appropriation

by that strategy of otherness which Edward Said, in the context of the
Middle East, called “orientalism.” It does not matter much that the radical
otherness of the culture in question is praised or valorized positively, as in
the preceding pages: the essential operation is that of differentiation, and
once that has been accomplished, the mechanism Said denounces has been
set in place. On the other hand, I don’t see how a first-world intellectual
can avoid this operation without falling back into some general liberal and
humanistic universalism: it seems to me that one of our basic political tasks
lies precisely in the ceaseless effort to remind the American public of the
radical difference of other national situations. [14, p. 77]
88 J. COGLE
Despite the provisional claims inserted into the essay, a tension remains
between Jameson’s gestures towards peripheral cultural material, and his
position as a critic operating firmly within a neo-imperialist state. This
sense of conflict is highly visible in surveying the response of postcolonial
scholars to “Third-World Literature”. The most remarked upon aspect
of the article is directly related to one of Jameson’s more didactic state-
ments: “All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical,
and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national
allegories ” [14, p. 69]. Along with the opening section discussing the
difficulty of Western readers to properly receive a non-canonical text
(often seen as diminishing or othering postcolonial literatures), critics
have often viewed this sentence as going beyond Jameson’s tendency to
generalise and becoming evidence of a parochial empiricism.
Ahmad’s “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness”, published a year later,
was the first of several claims in this fashion, and the essay has come to
represent a larger push away from Jameson by postcolonial critics. The
essay concedes sympathy with a number of Jameson’s points, particu-
larly that “the teaching of literature in the US academy be informed by
a sense not only of ‘western’ literature but of ‘world literature’ [and]
that the so-called literary canon be based not upon the exclusionary plea-
sures of dominant taste but upon an inclusive … sense of heterogeneity”
[16, p. 3]. Despite these assertions, Ahmad takes specific exception to
Jameson’s use of the term third world: “there are fundamental issues—
of periodization, social and linguistic formations, political and ideological
struggles within the field of literary production, and so on—which simply
cannot be resolved at this level of generality without an altogether posi-
tivist reductionism” [16, p. 4]. Ahmad sees the third world as a useful
term in “loose polemic contexts” but resists its deployment “as a basis
for producing theoretical knowledge, which presumes a certain rigor in
constructing the object of one’s knowledge” [16, p. 4]. Furthermore,
for Ahmad, the three-world system that Jameson denotes in his essay
erases the heterogeneity in a variety of developing countries, whereby
“various countries … have been assimilated into the global structure of
capitalism not as a single cultural ensemble but highly differentially, each
establishing its own circuits of (unequal) exchange with the metropolis,
each acquiring its own very distinct class formations” [16, p. 10]. Crucial
to Ahmad’s critique is a denunciation of Jameson’s notion of “cogni-
tive aesthetics”. Ahmad sees this desire for cognitive aesthetics as resting
“upon a suppression of the multiplicity of significant difference among
and within both the advanced capitalist countries and the imperialised
formations” [16, p. 3]. Throughout this critique, Ahmad displays the
multitude of political, economic and cultural realities in postcolonial
nations that Jameson supposedly elides when describing the Third World
as “a range of … countries which have suffered the experience of colo-
nialism and imperialism” [14, p. 67]. Ahmad’s essay was highly influential
and sparked a broader shift away from Jameson’s work in postcolo-
nial studies. Writing in 2006, Ian Buchanan claimed, Ahmad’s “critique
of Jameson is generally claimed as definitive; in fact I have not been
able to find one single rejoinder that is sustained enough to warrant
the name” [17, p. 174]. For Buchanan, the problems with critiques
of Jameson’s essay are ones of misinterpretation, claiming they “blindly
misread ‘national allegory’ as ‘nationalist ideology’” [17, p. 174]. Across
his essay, Buchanan seeks to contextualise “Third-World Literature” and
reinforces a particular aspect of Jameson’s writing: his discussions are
committed to dialectical thought and, therefore, the problems he works
through remain in tension throughout. In this particular example, the
problem of how to theorise the nation unsurprisingly revolves around
problematic prior concepts of nationhood. Jameson acknowledges these
longstanding cultural associations, but allows them to circulate in an
ambiguous manner.
While Jameson has predominantly avoided commenting on this
controversy, one of his major considerations of modernism again moves
into a similar area of debate. Published early in the twenty-first century, A
Singular Modernity considers the modernisation process in a broad sense,
but also concentrates on the more specific periods of high modernism and
late modernism. The work opens with a wide-ranging survey of opposing
notions of modernity, the term’s etymology, early critical debates and
contemporary considerations. The text delineates a heterogeneous sense
of the period; however, Jameson also argues against a turn towards
theories of alternative modernities:
Everyone knows the formula by now: this means that there can be a
modernity for everybody which is different from the standard or hege-
monic Anglo-Saxon model. Whatever you dislike about the latter … can
be effaced by the reassuring … notion that you can fashion your own
modernity differently, so that there can be a Latin-American kind, or an
Indian kind … and so forth…. But this is to overlook the other funda-
mental meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself.
90 J. COGLE
The standardization projected by capitalist globalization … casts consider-

able doubt on all these pious hopes for cultural variety in a future world
colonized by a universal market order. [5, pp. 12–13]1
Critics discussing alternate modernities or “geomodernisms” have argued

for a less restricted notion of the modernist period and its canon. In these
areas of study, scholars have considered the global aspects of modernism.
For example, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel claim that connecting
disparate modernisms “requires a rethinking of periodization, genealo-
gies, affiliations, and forms. To some degree, this rethinking estranges
the category of modernism itself. The term modernism breaks open, into
something we call geomodernisms, which signals a locational approach to
modernisms’ engagement with cultural and political discourses of global
modernity” [18, p. 3]. In Jameson’s rebuke of some of this work above,
we might argue that Jameson’s work on high modernism again becomes
susceptible to accusations of cultural imperialism. His insistence on the
priority of Western capitalist systems in postcolonial contexts has the
potential to erase difference and the agency of the subaltern. This view
of Jameson should be tempered, however, by work throughout his career
that argue for a more complex and global sense of modernism. In Post-
modernism, Jameson describes modernism as “uniquely corresponding to
an uneven moment of social development, or to what Ernst Bloch called
the ‘simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’” [2, p. 307]. Jameson’s imper-
ative is to reinforce what he sees as missing from theories of alternative
modernities, which is the underlying development of global capitalism—
even as it plays out in an uneven fashion across the globe. This chapter
will argue that Jameson’s engagement with canonical modernist litera-
ture acknowledges a multitude of modernist practices and processes of
uneven development, while maintaining this underlying economic narra-
tive. We may be unable to reconcile scholarship that insists on the radical
plurality of the modernisation process with Jameson’s apparent “reduc-
tionist economism” [19, p. 148]. Nevertheless, through his notion of
cognitive mapping, we might still align Jameson’s work with a variety
of ongoing discussions pertaining to modernism in postcolonial literary
studies.
The Centre and the Periphery

in Jameson’s High-Modernist Canon
The modernist canon Jameson describes in his published work remains
in some form of flux up until the late 1970s. The modernists he sees as
paradigmatic across his career appear from The Origins of a Style onwards,
but his early material is more likely to include authors who fall outside
of the high-modernist canon. Marxism and Form contains a reading of
Ernest Hemingway, for example, where Hemingway’s concentration on
writing as “labour” produces a specific modernist style: “The art-sentence
itself, as it has been so variously cultivated and practiced in modern times
from Flaubert to Hemingway, may be seen alternatively as a type of work
or mode of production…. In modern literature, indeed, the production
of the sentence becomes itself a new kind of event within the work,
and generates a whole new kind of form” [10, p. 397]. Jameson sees
this personal style as a particular response to cultural fragmentation, in a
manner typically reserved for figures such as Joyce: “As for the human
environment of Hemingway’s books, expatriation is itself a kind of device
or pretext for them. For the immense … fabric of American social reality
itself is clearly inaccessible to the careful and selective type of sentence
which he practices: so it is useful to do with a reality thinned out, the
reality of foreign cultures and of foreign languages” [10, p. 412]. Here,
Hemingway’s novels manage to avoid the formal problems that Jameson
associates with any realist attempt to map and depict modernism as a
period. Hemingway’s style is seen as a distinctively modernist solution to
this formal dilemma.
At this stage of his career, Jameson’s sense of the modernist canon is
also less restricted because the period and its terminology are more loosely
defined. For example, “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of
Modernism” uses the term quite broadly, including within its remit Picas-
so’s early “African” period (1906–1909) and Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn
(1963). Meanwhile, in “Three Modern Painters”, Jameson sees Cézanne
and Flaubert as “the moment of the twin birth of modernism and mass
culture, when as in some historically new ‘division of labor,’ the older
molar storytelling or representational unities are now assigned to the
‘degraded’ status of the best-seller or the film, while the molecular experi-
ence of language or sheer paint becomes the perceptual center of the new
‘high art’” [20, p. 260]. Marxism and Form, on the other hand, discusses
a “new modernism [that] differs from the older classical one of the turn
92 J. COGLE
of the century…. What characterizes the new modernism is however

precisely that it is popular, maybe not in small mid-Western towns, but in
the dominant world of fashion and the mass media” [10, pp. 413–414].
Jameson’s examples of this new modernism—“John Cage’s music, Andy
Warhol’s movies, novels by Burroughs, plays by Beckett, Godard, camp,
Norman O. Brown, psychedelic experiences”—would remain largely
unchanged in his later essays that theorise postmodernism as a more
definitive break from modernism, published over a decade later [10,
p. 413]. In these moments, the reader can glimpse how Jameson demar-
cations of these periods and their canons are less restricted at this stage of
his career.
By the time of Fables of Aggression, however, Jameson’s sense of the
modernism’s literature would be noticeably more limited. T. S. Eliot,
William Faulkner, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Marcel Proust would
continue to make regular appearances, but middlebrow authors such as
Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald would no longer figure in this mate-
rial. Two years later, Jameson would claim modernism had “now become
a literary institution”, with certain authors of the period categorised and
reified in an academic context [12, p. 206]. Even as he appears to crit-
icise this development, it remains that his own groupings of modernist
figures become somewhat conservative after this period, and his param-
eters for discussing modernism become more established. Particularly in
more glancing interactions with the early twentieth century, he allows
high modernism to take an expected position within his larger narrative
of capitalist development and the increasing reification of the Western
world. In Postmodernism, for example, Jameson depicts the period within
these parameters—and reinforces the importance of high modernism to its
depiction—when claiming “the various modernisms have … often consti-
tuted violent reactions against modernization as they have replicated its
values and tendencies by their own formal insistence on novelty, innova-
tion, the transformation of older forms, therapeutic iconoclasm and the
processing of new (aesthetic) wonder-working technologies” [2, p. 304].
He also emphasises this high-modernist preference in his discussion of
late modernism, which he will more strictly separate from the high or
classical modernists later in his career. For example, Jameson claims: “The
first modernists had to operate in a world in which no acknowledged …
role existed for them and in which the very form and concept of their
own specific ‘works of art’ were lacking. But for [the] late modernists
this is no longer the case … Nabokov is unlike Joyce … by virtue of
the fact that Joyce already existed and that he can serve as a model” [5,
pp. 199–200]. Here, the late modernists transform the heterogeneity of
the classical modernist moment into a more limited series of conventional
forms. Jameson no longer attributes a utopian impulse to the literature
of the latter period, which we can link to the diminished cultural impor-
tance he attributes to late modernism. He reinforces this notion when he
describes Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) as “one of the rare … masterpieces of
the late modern” [5, p. 201].
Furthermore, as his sense of the modernist canon begins to concen-
trate more explicitly on the high modern examples, the figures within
this group remain largely unchanged. Jameson’s limited discussion of
Virginia Woolf becomes a revealing example of this tendency. As John
Mepham notes, “between Virginia Woolf’s death in 1941 and the mid-
1970s the number of books published about her work was quite small.
Since that time, however, there has been an enormous flood of publi-
cations” [21, p. 1]. The importance of Woolf to an established canon
of Western modernist novels has increased considerably since Jameson’s
early training, yet his engagement with her remains curiously indirect. For
example, his essay “Modernism and Imperialism” (1988) was originally
published as part of a series of Field Day pamphlets entitled “Nation-
alism, Colonialism and Literature”. Terry Eagleton and Edward Said
also provided essays for the series. The three pamphlets would later be
reprinted together as a short volume. Jameson looks at E. M. Forster’s
Howards End and Joyce’s Ulysses in his contribution, as well as briefly
mentioning Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). In both of these early publi-
cations of “Modernism and Imperialism”, Jameson includes a note that
states, “formally, the position of Mrs. Wilcox … demands comparison
with that of Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, an anal-
ysis of which forms a part of the larger version of this present essay” [see
22, p. 16n; 23, p 56n]. This larger version would never eventuate: in The
Modernist Papers this article is once again reprinted, but the footnote—
and any extended discussion of To the Lighthouse—is omitted [See 20,
p. 161].
More recently, in the first chapter of The Antinomies of Realism,
Jameson cites a brief passage from Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), which
describes a meal. He does not reveal the origin of the citation—neither
stating the author’s name nor providing a bibliographical footnote—and
only refers to the passage as “the anonymous lunch” [24, p. 25]. Well into
the next chapter, Jameson alludes to the citation again, mentioning “the
94 J. COGLE
lunch-flower of Virginia Woolf that has been quoted above” [24, p. 37].
This time Jameson provides a footnote that reveals the specific novel he
is discussing. At this stage of his text, however, the reader may certainly
be confused as to when exactly Woolf was mentioned “above”. Further-
more, in his first opaque reference to Woolf here, he claims that the lunch
she describes “is a rather different lunch from many we can remember
reading about: the one which makes Mr. Bloom belch with satisfaction in
Ulysses ; the immense two-hundred-page lunches in Proust…. All of those
… are inserted into one or another kind of narrative time; the anony-
mous lunch in which one course is peeled off after another is not” [24,
p. 25]. The inference that we might not remember Woolf’s literature, or
that it operates on a differing level to two other paradigmatic modernists
is not further discussed. Once again, Woolf remains a marginal figure in
Jameson’s work, one whose status has not risen to a level similar to that
of Joyce, and her treatment becomes symptomatic of Jameson’s restricted
engagement with modernist literature.
Jameson’s common reliance on Joyce’s Ulysses to represent the
modernist period is also indicative of a tendency to contain modernist
literature’s qualities. Marxism and Form’s chapter on Adorno, for
instance, mentions Henry James, Thomas Mann, Proust and Schoenberg
to demonstrate variations in modernist cultural material, but it is Joyce
who “embodies an exemplary [modernist] progress from a derivative
personal style … through the multiple pastiches of Ulysses , toward some-
thing which transcends both style and pastiche altogether, and which …
may stand as a distant representation of some future linguistic organiza-
tion of a postindividualistic character” [10, p. 34]. Elsewhere, the novel’s
use of semi-autonomous chapters and the framing device of a single day
are seen as modernist responses to both the problem of narrative form and
the increasing fragmentation of subjectivity. In A Singular Modernity,
Ulysses is described as a reaction to the modernisation process, tied to an
impossible imperative to contain the changing, expanding world: “And
does not every line of Ulysses bear witness to an ever-changing empirical
reality which Joyce’s multiple forms (from the Odyssey parallel on down
to the chapter form and sentence structure themselves) are unable to
master?” [5, pp. 207–208]. In “Ulysses in History”, Jameson describes
this operation as a utopian gesture, claiming the novel goes through a
process of de-reification, “whereby the text itself is unsettled and under-
mined, a process whereby the universal tendency of its terms, narrative
tokens, representations, to solidify into an achieved and codified symbolic
order as well as a massive narrative surface, is perpetually suspended”

[20, p. 143]. Despite his insistence on the individuality and specificity
of the various major modernists, in this one locus Jameson is able to
interconnect many of his recurring themes of modernism. In Ulysses ,
he finds narratives of perpetual reinvention, industrialisation, imperialism,
colonialism and fragmentation, with the novel becoming an all-purpose
response to many of the historical factors of the period.
Intriguingly, Jameson has made a number of recent comments
discussing his textual choices, particularly in relation to modernist litera-
ture. In The Modernist Papers , he claims:
The literary texts might also be taken to form some personal canon, if
not indeed a constellation of more universal validity. But that is to reckon
without absences or omissions which are themselves accidental, however
much I regret them. Only Japan seemed called upon to stand for the non-
Western … world; which scarcely documents my own personal debts to
Latin America, to North Africa, or to China. As far as my private formation
is concerned, indeed I would have to be puzzled by the absence of Pound
of Faulkner…. To be sure, there are sometimes professional explanations
for such gaps: some of the texts discussed in this collection are here because
I taught them in classes and seminars; but just as often works and writers
equally important to me are missing precisely because I taught them so
often. [20, pp. ix–x]
Similarly, in a roundtable article focusing on The Antinomies of Realism,

Jameson responds to discussions concerning his exclusion of American
authors, touching on modernism briefly: “This collection of Americanist
responses to my book on realism demands … some explanation about the
exclusion of American novels, something I’m always reluctant to give. But
for literary critics, the basic autobiographical questions turn on opinions,
judgment and taste…. I could answer some of those quickly—I grew up
on Faulkner, Pound and James” [25, p. 1086]. In this fashion, Jameson
commonly writes against a sense of his career as rigidly systemic and
ordered. The passage reminds readers of the contingencies and compro-
mises that influence his published body of work—despite the curatorial
operation he continues to perform as he collects multitudes of previously
available articles in newer texts. As his comments on alternate modernities
in A Singular Modernity suggest, Jameson is conscious of several develop-
ments in literary theory that argue for the widening of canonical focuses,
or for more complex considerations of texts that exists on the periphery
96 J. COGLE
of the established canon. The caginess of the above quotations indicates

Jameson is aware of the conventional choices found across his body of
work, and the Eurocentric, patriarchal biases they might imply.
As mentioned above, this focus on Western modernists is closely
connected to an insistence on a narrative of capitalist development. Here,
Henry Ford occasionally stands as an example of the age, one we can
compare with Jameson’s oft-used authors. Ford’s assembly line becomes
shorthand for capitalism’s progress, and the worker’s alienation from their
own production. Jameson expands on this by discussing Max Weber’s
notion of rationalization in A Singular Modernity: “‘rationalization’ is a
process whose … precondition lies in the dismantling of traditional activ-
ities, not least traditional forms of craft skills, as those survive on into the
factory process…. Ford’s assembly line comes into view, along with …
the loss of control over the process of the worker himself, who no longer
sees and grasps it as a meaningful whole” [5, p. 83]. Across Jameson’s
career, Ford makes several appearances, in this instance becoming simply
an industrial process, at other times ironically elevated to a philosopher
of the age. Jameson discusses modernist history in this context as “that
endless series of sheer facts and unrelated events proposed, in their very
different ways, by Nietzsche as well as by Henry Ford (‘one goddamned
thing after another’)” [5, p. 29].
There are also several recurring instances where Ford appears tangen-
tially in relation to discussions of nostalgia, and these intersections
demonstrate how Ford becomes a floating signifier in Jameson’s work.
As a major figure in Doctorow’s Ragtime, Jameson often mentions Ford
when discussing the novel. For Jameson, Doctorow’s use of real historical
figures in a self-consciously artificial fashion is indicative of the difficulty
in postmodernism to represent the past. Jameson also mentions Ford in
“On Raymond Chandler”, this time in relation to corporate branding:
“the Cold War also marked the beginning of the great post-war boom,
and with it, the prodigious expansion in advertising…. The older products
had … a permanence of identity that can still be captured … in farm coun-
try…. Here, the brand-name is still synonymous with the object itself: a
car is a ‘Ford,’ a lighter is a ‘Ronson,’ a hat is a ‘Stetson’” [13, p. 77].
In these examples, Ford becomes a thoroughly postmodern and inter-
textual concept. He circulates freely as a historical figure, an emblematic
brand and an industrial mode. The version of modernity that Jameson
describes when using Ford as a particular representation of the era takes
on another facet, however, in the work that comes after Postmodernism.
Here Jameson begins to use the term “post-Fordism” in relation to the

development of capitalism and its dominant mode of production, particu-
larly in The Seeds of Time (1994). David Gartman discusses how Jameson
uses post-Fordism as a concept in order demarcate the beginning of the
postmodern:
Jameson [seeks] to explain the recent emergence of a postmodern culture

as a consequence of a new stage of the capitalist economy called post-
Fordism. In his earlier work on postmodernism, Jameson relied largely
on Ernest Mandel’s theory of late capitalism to provide an economic
grounding for cultural changes. But as Mike Davis points out, Jameson’s
cultural stage of postmodernism, which begins in full force in 1973,
is incongruent with Mandel’s economic stage of late capitalism, which
commences in 1945. Perhaps for this reason Jameson’s more recent state-
ment on these issues employs the language of post-Fordism to characterize
the economic stage corresponding with postmodernism. This not only
makes his chronology more synchronous, since the beginning of the post-
Fordist economy is generally dated from the early 1970s, but it also makes
Jameson’s work compatible with the growing body of work, including that
of David Harvey, Edward Soja, Lawrence Grossberg, and Stuart Hall, that
links postmodernism and post-Fordism. [26, pp. 120–121]
Gartman’s article is an extensive discussion of the terms Fordism and post-

Fordism, as well as the boundaries created by Jameson and other critics in
their usage of such terms, calling into question the rigour of their usage.
Gartman claims that theories of Fordism require further development:
First, the theory must loosen its synchronous and uniform conception
of social change to recognize the possibility—even the likelihood—of
diverse and uneven developments. Culture should be seen as a response
or reaction to economic changes by producers within a particular social
structure…. Second, this theory must also be altered to recognize that
these cultural responses may exert a dialectical influence on economic
developments, facilitating and contradicting them. Such dialectical influ-
ence further accounts for the disjointed, uneven movement of history. [25,
p. 135]
While Gartman is focused on Jameson’s notion of postmodernity, the

passage is especially relevant to Jameson’s ambiguous sense of modernist
98 J. COGLE
development. Through his persistent reframing of modernism’s bound-

aries, Jameson’s engagements with the period are marked by an even more
pronounced blurring of categories.
Within the essays and texts that concentrate on Western modernists,
however, Jameson’s discussions of nation reveal a more complex sense
of the literary moment, one more interested in peripheries and uneven
development than Gartman claims above. And despite the contro-
versy surrounding “Third-World Literature” and Jameson’s comments
in A Singular Modernity, his work on modernism addresses notions of
alternate modernities that reflect this notion of uneven development.
For example, in “Modernism and Imperialism”, he comments on how
England, though being “the very heartland of imperialism, is also that
national terrain which seems to have been the least propitious for the
development of any indigenous modernism” [20, p. 159]. In a note, he
adds, “it is, I take it, the position of Terry Eagleton’s stimulating Exiles
and Emigres … that all the most important modern writers of what we
think of as the English canon are in fact social marginals of various kinds,
when not outright foreigners” [20, p. 168n9]. This is particularly true of
Jameson’s most frequently used examples of modernism: the Irish Joyce,
T. S. Eliot, who took British citizenship, and Pound, whose career began
in earnest in London, all fit this description in some capacity.2 With paral-
lels to the sense that Conrad exists between two literary positions in The
Political Unconscious , Jameson is often interested in authors who cross
boundaries in terms of nation. For instance, when discussing T. S. Eliot,
Jameson states: “the Europeanism of the American poet … could function
as a kind of aesthetic NATO ideology and prepare the British integra-
tion into the postwar continent” [5, p. 168]. This sense of modernism
as particularly transnational also appears in his work on E. M. Forster,
Wyndham Lewis and, unsurprisingly, Joyce. The material on these three
modernists often concentrates on notions of nation, empire and occupa-
tion, ultimately pointing to the larger conceptual threads that run through
Jameson’s often fragmentary material on modernism. Here, his attempts
to impose a linear narrative related primarily to Western capitalist devel-
opment contrast with his textual readings, which reinforce the diverse,
transnational and alternate nature of global modernisms. This work also
offers an opposing view of his sense of modernism: Jameson often adheres
to somewhat conventional senses of the modernist canon, but also allows
contradictory impulses to appear within this framework.
Fables of Aggression follows this pattern, with its early attempt to

consider the modernist text in terms of the global—even as Wyndham
Lewis, “in Britain today … retains a kind of national celebrity and is read
as a more scandalous and explosive Waugh; while internationally his name
remains a dead letter” [11, p. 2]. Lewis is another of Jameson’s transi-
tional figures: “an internationalist, the most European and least insular
of all the great contemporary British writers” [11, p. 88]. In this regard,
Jameson claims, “in Lewis’ imagination … the German nation, as the
pariah of European politics and the victim of Versailles, tends to figure
the id rather than that repressive superego which the Prussian manner
has generally connoted for foreigners” [11, p. 89]. Within this context,
Jameson introduces his notion of national allegory, whereby “the use of
national types projects an essentially allegorical mode of representation, in
which the individual characters figure those more abstract national char-
acteristics which are read as their inner essence” [11, p. 90]. Jameson will
complicate this notion of national allegory in his reading of Tarr, where
“the various national types find themselves grouped within a common
ballroom or Grand Hotel, [and] a more complex network of interrela-
tions and collisions emerges…. Under these circumstances, allegory ceases
to be [a] static decipherment of one-one one correspondences” [11,
p. 90]. The national types represented in Tarr become reflective of a
larger political context, which sees “not merely the nation-state itself as
the basic functional unit of world politics, but also the objective existence
of a system of nation-states, the international diplomatic machinery of
pre-World-War-I Europe which originating in the sixteenth century, was
dislocated in significant ways by the War and the Soviet Revolution” [11,
p. 94]. From here, Jameson will argue that “national allegory should be
understood as a formal attempt to bridge the increasing gap between the
existential data of everyday life within a given nation-state and the struc-
tural tendency of monopoly capital to develop on a worldwide, essentially
transnational scale” [11, p. 94].
While Fables of Aggression remains predominantly focused on Europe,
Jameson will expand on these notions of global monopoly capitalism
with work on modernism elsewhere. “Modernism and Imperialism”, for
example, looks at the development of modernism in relation to the
emergence of the colonial system. The essay predominantly discusses E.
M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), with Jameson seeing the figure of
Mr. Wilcox as representative of a series of cognitive gaps between the
coloniser, colonised nations and the metropolitan cities at the heart of
100 J. COGLE
empires: “We are only able to see that face the ‘Imperial type’ turns
inward, towards the internal metropolitan reality. The other pole of
the relationship, what defines him fundamentally and essentially in his
‘imperial’ function—the persons of the colonized—remains structurally
occluded, and cannot but so remain … as a result of the limits of the
system” [20, p. 163]. In the same essay, Jameson will see Joyce in this
same context of colonialism and imperialism:
The hypothesis suggested here—between the emergence of a properly

modernist “style” and the representational dilemmas of the new imperial
world system—will be validated only by the kind of new work it enables….
[This is] not, in this period, to be found in … the Third World, or in the
colonies: there the face of imperialism is brute force … open exploita-
tion; but there also the mapping of the imperialist world system remains
structurally incomplete, for the colonial subject will be unable to register
the peculiar transformations of … metropolitan life which accompany the
imperial relationship…. What we seek, therefore, is a kind of exceptional
situation, one of the overlap and coexistence between two incommen-
surable realities which are … those of the metropolis and of the colony
simultaneously…. At least one such peculiar space exists, in the historical
contingency of our global system: it is Ireland…. [Here] we may expect
to find, in some abstractly possible Irish modernism, a form which on the
one hand unites Forster’s sense of the providential yet seemingly accidental
encounters of the characters with Woolf’s aesthetic closure, but which on
the other hand projects those onto a radically different kind of space, a
space no longer central, as in English life, but marked as marginal and
ec-centric after the fashion of the colonized areas of the imperial system….
But this “deduction” finds immediate historical confirmation, for I have in
fact been describing Ulysses . [20, pp. 164–165]
In his essay on Jameson and Fordism, Gartman denies the presence of

“responses that vary from country to country” [26, p. 135]. Across
Jameson’s career, however, we can find examples of him discussing
high modernism in terms of national and geographic permutations—he
often compares different instances of modernism with various narratives
of industrialisation and imperialism. These moments serve to reinforce
his narrative of high modernism’s sheer heterogeneity, as well as his
underlying principle that high-modernist works ultimately reflect the capi-
talist industrialisation process. In a non-Western context, for example,
Jameson’s reading of Sōseki, which outlines a combination of Proust’s
“idea of a routine and a daily life” and a “modernist distension of tempo-

rality” within the novel Meian, does so under the pretext that Japan’s
modernisation process was much more rapid than Europe’s [20, p. 300].
In doing so, Jameson asks if in modernist Japan “there existed the
same … bourgeois stereotypes about everyday life that were constructed
in the West during the realist period and which had in the modern
already entered into a crisis…. One could imagine a situation, in the …
East, in which the construction of bourgeois everyday life … took place
simultaneously with its modern moment” [20, p. 300].
Here, we can closely align Jameson’s work on the modern with his
sense of cognitive mapping. Critics have predominantly associated the
notion of cognitive mapping with Jameson’s discussions of postmoder-
nity, where it makes its most notable appearances. In Postmodernism, he
considers an aesthetics of cognitive mapping, which he sees as a not-
yet-existing cultural practice, but a crucial process in the demystification
of a larger postmodern capitalist system. When discussing this concept,
Jameson draws on Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960), as well as
Georg Lukács’ conflation of realism with the representation of totalities.
In Postmodernism, Jameson claims a “political culture appropriate to our
own situation will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental
organizing concern. I will therefore provisionally define the aesthetic of
this new (and hypothetical) cultural form as an aesthetic of cognitive
mapping ” [2, p. 51]. He sees the cognitive map as providing “a situa-
tional representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster
and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s
structures as a whole” [2, p. 51]. In his early work on cognitive mapping,
Jameson occasionally reinforces the notion that “the social totality can
be sensed, as it were, from the outside, like a skin at which the Other
somehow looks, but which we ourselves will never see” [27, p. 114].
In “Third-World Literature”, he aligns himself with Lukács’ “episte-
mology in History and Class Consciousness according to which ‘mapping’
or the grasping of the social totality is structurally available to the domi-
nated rather than the dominating classes” [14, pp. 87–88n26]. The essay
attempts to see regional literatures in relation to varying histories of
colonisation, as well as differing situations within contemporary global
capitalism. Within this context, Jameson ties his national allegory hypoth-
esis to the notion of cognitive mapping, whereby “what is here called
‘national allegory’ is clearly a form of mapping, so … the present essay …
sketches a theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature” [14,
102 J. COGLE
p. 87n26]. The work on Forster, Joyce and Lewis discussed throughout

this chapter may not mention cognitive mapping, but the imperative to
map an empirical capitalist system in these essays has obvious affinities
with the concept. Despite the ambiguities that surround Jameson’s sense
of modernism and its political potential, the modernist text remains a
mapping operation within his work. The primacy that he attributes to
Joyce and Ulysses in particular may reflect an often-conservative version of
the modernist canon, but the text is read as providing an immense cogni-
tive map of wider global contexts. In this light, the relationship between
cognitive mapping and allegory becomes important: Jameson’s reading of
Ulysses does not claim that the text maps an all-encompassing set of colo-
nial relationships, but sees the novel as able to discuss a broader colonial
situation through its specific national position.
More recently, work within postcolonial studies has begun to read
modernist novels in terms of cultural geographies. Within this area of
study, however, critics have not often referenced Jameson. For example,
in her discussion of the geopolitical in Virginia Woolf’s fiction, Susan
Stanford Friedman claims “Fredric Jameson has famously commanded in
the opening pages of The Political Unconscious ‘Always historicize!’ …
To this imperative, we need to add ‘Always spatialize!’—that is, always
ask how locational and geographical specifics particularize any given
phenomenon or interpretation of it” [28, p. 130]. Friedman’s engage-
ment with Jameson remains brief, however, and she does not mention
his work on modernism or his notion of cognitive mapping. Similarly,
Jessica Berman’s reading of Ulysses is interested in related questions of
geopolitical mapping, in conjunction with ideas of empire and colonial
histories. She claims, “when Stephen walks over Sandymount Strand,
pondering the significance of the beach and the history of invasion it
has witnessed, we may see very clearly the geopolitical implications of the
terrain as inseparable from its relationship with human society over time”
[29, p. 288]. Her work does not reference Jameson, although a mutual
engagement here would offer the opportunity for more complex under-
standings of modernist texts. We might attribute this lack of engagement
with Jameson to both the relative obscurity of his modernist work and
the ongoing distance practised by postcolonial scholars in the years after
his “Third-World Literature” essay. Furthermore, his dismissal of alter-
nate modernities insists on the primacy of the narrative of capital, at the
same time as he concentrates on a limited number of modernist novels.
Yet his work on these novels reinforces a similar sense of heterogeneity to
the modernist moment as argued for by critics such as Berman, Friedman

and others. An interpretive practice that sees the modernist text in terms
of the geopolitical, while remaining aware of Jameson’s notion of cogni-
tive mapping, would offer additional nuances to both of these ongoing
discussions. In this manner, we might consider ways in which Western
modernisms and peripheral or alternate modernisms might further relate
or speak to each other, even if fundamental differences remain regarding
the underlying causes of the modernisation process.
Metacommentary, Western Marxism

and the Canonisation of High Modernism
Jameson’s writings on modernist texts also have a more insular—but no
less complex—focus, one that relates to the Western theoretical land-
scape as it has developed across his career. His discussions of the global
and empirical in modernism relate to a Marxist model of broader capi-
talist change. Another historical perspective is apparent, however, in his
engagement with a variety of scholarly interpretations of modernist texts.
In this manner, Jameson’s notion of “metacommentary” often becomes
a guiding parameter for his engagement with modernist literature. The
essay “Metacommentary” helped to establish Jameson’s reputation and
earned him the William Riley Parker Prize in 1971.
Even so, critics more commonly discuss the essay in terms of Jameson’s
larger project of dialectical criticism [see 30; 4, p. 44]. David S. Gross sees
the essay as an example of subterfuge, claiming “the dialectic … is the
component in Marxism which links it to the self-critical, self-scrutinizing
thought about thought in modern theory, as Jameson pointed out
(without mentioning Marxism by the way) in his famous PLMA essay
‘Metacommentary’ [31, p. 102]. The essay’s prominent venue of publi-
cation and fluency with poststructuralist theory suggests Jameson was
deliberately fashioning his work in order to reach a wider academic audi-
ence. As Robert T. Tally Jr.. suggests, “any commentary upon a given
literary text must involve metacommentary, which for Jameson stands
as another code word for the project of dialectical criticism itself” [32,
p. 58]. Despite its relationship to Jameson’s wider notion of dialectical
thought, however, it should be observed that the “Metacommentary”
essay is more specifically concerned with the notion of the literary
critic as a figure operating within particular historical contexts. Jameson
claims metacommentary is “a reflexive operation proposed for staging
104 J. COGLE
the struggle within an individual literary and cultural text of various

interpretations that are themselves so many ‘methods’ or philosophies
or ideological worldviews” [33, p. ix].3 While, as Caren Irr and Ian
Buchanan note, “in more recent years this term seems to have fallen into
disuse”, it remains clear that Jameson’s later material on high modernism
often works through this particular kind of operation [34, p. 6]. Perhaps
it is because his early years in the academy witnessed the canonisation of
modernism—within both university courses and scholarly work—that he
so often returns to considering the scholarly reception of certain novels.
Jameson’s work on Ulysses , Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka and Thomas
Mann reinforces this notion. In the chapter on Conrad in The Polit-
ical Unconscious , Jameson briefly alludes to this aspect of his project,
claiming that the coexistence of “differentiated cultural ‘spaces’ in Conrad
marks his work as a unique occasion for the historical analysis of …
literary forms. It also offers a no less unique occasion for the type
of investigation around which this book has been organized, namely
the ‘metacommentary,’ or the historical and dialectical reevaluation of
conflicting interpretive methods” [12, p. 208]. In “Ulysses in History”
Jameson seeks to place Joyce’s novel in new contexts, arguing “it would
be surprising indeed if we were unable to invent newer and fresher ways
of reading Joyce; on the other hand, the traditional interpretations …
have become so sedimented into our text … that it is hard see it afresh”
[20, p. 137]. Jameson goes on to claim that the traditional readings “are,
I would say, threefold, and I will call them the mythical, the psycho-
analytical and the ethical readings” [20, p. 137]. The chapter works
to place psychoanalytic readings of the novel in broader, more political
frameworks, discussing
the inadequacy of that third conventional interpretation of Ulysses …

namely the fetishization of the text in terms of “archetypal” patterns of
father-son relationships…. Surely today, after so much prolonged scrutiny
of the nuclear family, it has become apparent that the obsession with
these relationships and the privileging of such impoverished interper-
sonal schemas drawn from the nuclear family itself are to be read as …
defense mechanisms against the loss of the knowable community. [20,
pp. 141–142]
This material emphasises the historical possibility of interpretive methods,

in a similar manner to Jameson’s historicising of narrative form. Another
scholarly context underlies much of this work, that of Western Marxists

and their discussions of modernism. In the first half of the twentieth
century, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, amongst
others, engaged in debates over modernism in print. In Jameson’s
negotiation of these debates, along with his reframing of other critical
engagements with modernism, we can glimpse another reason that the
period occupies such an ambiguous position within his work. Here, his
alignment remains fluid, while allowing for larger historical narratives
surrounding notions of monopoly capitalism, empire and reification to
retain their priority.
In many instances, when Jameson engages with modernist authors
and texts in detail, he returns to surveying the critical reception that
has developed in relation to them. Discussing Kafka, Jameson reads
common critical practice as such: “You do not have to posit some heavy-
handed message (Angst or the ‘human condition’) provided you have
nailed down the deeper subject matter, which seems … to fall into …
three options: the Oedipus complex or at least the guilt of subalter-
nity; bureaucratic dictatorship or the dystopia of modernity; or … God
and our relationship to him or to his absence” [20, p. 96]. In rela-
tion to Thomas Mann, he similarly asks: “Is Thomas Mann outmoded?
… To be sure Buddenbrooks is a classic (but that is just another way
of becoming outmoded); while the great debates of The Magic Moun-
tain between liberalism and communism (or fascism) are now, for many,
equally dated…. As for Doktor Faustus … is its equation of Nazism with
diabolism really relevant any longer?” [20, p. 11]. Here Jameson writes
in a general sense, although his concerns about the thematic interpre-
tation of modernist literature are explicated in more detail elsewhere.
As mentioned above, he sees the critical interpretations of Ulysses as
working in three separate ways: “the mythical, the psychoanalytical and
the ethical”. In terms of the mythical, Jameson asks:
In this day and age, in which the whole thrust of a militant feminism has
been against the nuclear and the patriarchal family, is it really appropriate
to recast Ulysses along the lines of marriage counseling and anxiously to
interrogate its characters … with a view towards … restoring this family?
Has our whole experience of Mr Bloom’s Dublin reduced itself to this
the quest for a “happy ending” in which the hapless protagonist is to
virilize himself and become a more successful realization of the dominant
patriarchal, authoritarian male? [20, p. 138]
106 J. COGLE
For Jameson, this “particular reading is part of the more general attempt
to fit Ulysses back into the Odyssey parallel” [20, p. 138]. Jameson works
to diminish the importance of this kind of interpretive practice, claiming:
“This parallelism, and the kind of matching it encourages between the
two levels of written and over-text, functions as … an empty form. Like
the classical unities, it offers a useful but wholly extrinsic set of limits
against which the writer works, and which serve as a purely mechan-
ical check on what risks … becoming an infinite proliferation of detail”
[20, p. 142]. Here, despite his conventional insistence on Ulysses as the
paradigmatic modernist text, Jameson’s reading practice seeks to move
past orthodox ways of interpreting Joyce’s formal devices. Intriguingly,
while his reading here refers back to a narrative of increased reifica-
tion in capitalist society, the focus returns to the colonial aspects of
Joyce’s Dublin and questions the position of private individuals, “given
the extraordinary relativization of all individual experience, and the trans-
formation of its contents into so many purely psychological reactions”
[20, p. 150].
Similarly, Jameson’s discussion of Conrad invokes a host of interpre-
tive practices surrounding Lord Jim and Nostromo, listing “myth critical”,
Freudian, “ego-psychological”, existential, Nietzschean and “structural-
textual” examples of and avenues for criticism [12, pp. 208–209].
Jameson references several critics in footnotes for each of these types of
interpretation, where he includes scholars such as Albert J. Guérard, J.
Hillis Miller, Bernard Myer, Edward Said and Ian Watt [12, pp. 208–
209n6]. The critical works he references span a period from the early
1960s up until the mid-1970s. Characteristically, across over seventy
pages on Conrad, Jameson does not engage with this contemporaneous
work in any sustained manner. His work does, however, seek to place
these interpretive options in a wider historical context, in order to assert
a larger narrative of capitalist development: “The burden of our reading
of Lord Jim has been to restore the whole socially concrete subtext of
late nineteenth-century rationalization and reification of which the novel
is so powerfully … the expression and Utopian compensation alike”
[12, p. 266]. At the same time, Jameson often discusses an “ideology
of modernism”, a set of preconceptions that he sees in contemporary
critical practices. In “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of
Modernism”, Jameson defines this notion in more explicit terms, whereby
“a coherent and quite systemic ideology … imposes its conceptual limi-
tations on our aesthetic thinking and our taste and judgments, and in
its own way projects an utterly distorted model of literary history” [34,
p. 417]. As in his discussion of Barthes’ “reality effect”, Jameson criticises
work that brings a modernist context to literary forms that were written
in different historical situations: “I simply want to underscore the limits
of the ideology of modernism to account for the great realistic works,
and to suggest that to prove Dickens was really a symbolist … Balzac a
myth-maker and George Eliot some Victorian version of Henry James if
not even of Dostoevsky, is an intellectually dishonest operation that skirts
all the real issues” [34, p. 420]. Jameson’s imperative in these moments is
once again one of metacommentary, which insists on a more self-reflexive
view of history and the situated nature of any interpretive practice.
A Singular Modernity seeks to further delineate the manner in which
an ideology of modernism was formed. Here, Jameson discusses the
heterogeneity of the earlier modernist moment, before considering the
late modernist canonisation process: “in the moderns … form is never
given in advance: it is generated experimentally in the encounter, leading
on into formations that could never have been predicted (and whose
… interminable multiplicities the innumerable high modernisms amply
display)” [5, p. 208]. For Jameson, this defining of the modern only
begins with the canonisation of the high moderns by the late moderns.
He contrasts the more varied high-modernist moment with the “modest
… aesthetic autonomies of the late modern” and claims that this latter
moment allow not only the “possibility for that theorization that we have
characterized as the ideology of modernism, it also enables and autho-
rizes the production of … [the] middlebrow type” [5, pp. 209–210]. In A
Singular Modernity, this process—whereby the various experiments of the
high modernists are turned into the formal categories of the novel for the
late modernists—also influences the modernist cannon as it is formulated
in this period: “The canon is simply modernism, as the late modernists
have selected and rewritten it in their own image” [5, pp. 209–210].
Jameson reads the development of theories of modernism in academia
across the 1960s and 1970s as similarly affected by this more middle-
brow and easily categorised moment. As a result, these theories do not
satisfactorily deal with the multiplicity and invention of the earlier period
and become one of the major reasons for our inability to properly define
the modern. Through this discussion, Jameson aims to move beyond
a metacommentary that comments on what Wegner has recently called
“theoretical modernism”. As this particular ideology of the modern is
108 J. COGLE
perhaps no longer a dominant component of literary criticism, Jameson

instead turns to more thoroughly historicising its development.
Nevertheless, we must observe another valence to this critical oper-
ation. Jameson’s interaction with ideologies of the modern is refracted
through an ongoing engagement with several early Western Marxists
and their differing views of modernism. Disagreements between Ernst
Bloch and Lukács over German Expressionism in the late 1930s—along
with Bertolt Brecht’s posthumously published responses to this debate—
began an ongoing discussion of the nature of modernist cultural material
that involves contributions from Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Brecht,
amongst others. These earlier critics’ discussions and their ongoing recep-
tion often influence Jameson’s mediation between varying positions on
high modernism. They have also influenced the specific aspects of the
period that Jameson has concentrated on in his readings of modernist
literature, and the way he inserts himself into a more contemporary field
of theoretical discussion. Aesthetics and Politics (1977) collects essays
from these debates between the aforementioned Marxists, and Jameson
contributes an afterword, offering a keen sense of the landscape that
he inherits. The text engages thoroughly with the European reception
of these theorists, before we encounter Jameson’s own reframing of
the scholarly debates. In comparison with the work in Marxism and
Form—which is more invested in an American perception of Western
Marxists and uses their work as a starting point in which to perform
its own dialectical performances—Aesthetics and Politics offers a broader
sense of Jameson’s relationship to his Western Marxist influences. Here,
Jameson describes the arguments between Bloch, Lukács and others,
claiming that: “Much of the fascination of these jousts … comes from the
internal dynamism by which all the logical possibilities are rapidly gener-
ated in turn, so that it quickly extends beyond the local phenomenon of
Expressionism … to draw within its scope the problems of popular art,
naturalism, socialist realism, avant-gardism, media and finally modernism”
[34, p. 134]. In many cases, the subjects and ideas listed here are inte-
gral to Jameson’s own construction of periods. His essays on Thomas
Mann, for instance, while only mentioning these theorists in passing, are
highly concerned with Mann’s relationship to realism, high modernism
and popular culture in a way that interacts with Lukács’ perception of the
novelist especially.
Across his career, Jameson has often attempted to reconcile the

dialectical style of Adorno’s writing with the more rigorous system-
atic intentions of Lukács, particularly in a book such as The Political
Unconscious . He attempts to reframe the work of the two theorists in
other moments in his career. While strongly indebted to Lukács’ theory
of reification as discussed in History and Class Consciousness , Jameson
generally positions high modernism in a different relation to the process
than the earlier critic. And while he is indebted to Adorno’s sense
of superstructures, Jameson’s sense of the subversive potential of high
modernism is much more tempered. Ultimately, this negotiation of the
two positions is a governing factor in Jameson’s wavering attribution
of the political possibility of modernism. The moment in The Political
Unconscious where he discusses the “accumulated reification” of high
modernism is a moment more obviously indebted to Lukács. A few
years earlier, however, in Fables of Aggression, Jameson is more diplo-
matic. He contrasts “Lukács’ apologia for nineteenth-century realism, in
which modernism is denounced as the symptom … of the reification
of late capitalist social relations” with the work of Adorno and others
where “the formal innovations of modernism are to be understood as
essentially revolutionary acts, and in particular as the repudiation of the
values of a business society” [11, pp. 13–14]. Jameson notes, however,
that these two readings are not necessarily mutually exclusive. He argues,
instead, that modernism “reflects and reinforces such fragmentation and
commodification of the psyche … but … the various modernisms all
seek to overcome that reification as well, by the exploration of a new
Utopian and libidinal experience of the various sealed realms or psychic
compartments to which they are condemned” [11, pp. 13–14]. Jameson
sees these theoretical impulses within the model of dominant, persistent
and emerging historical modes—borrowed from Raymond Williams—
allowing for heterogeneity in the moment of high modernism. Jameson
ultimately sees the binary of reification and subversion as a tension
or contradiction. In some ways, he more commonly displaces Lukács’
theorisation of German Expressionist literature onto the literature of a
postmodern United States. For Jameson, cultural reification has expanded
even further in this period, and he reads contemporary representations
of reality in highly negative terms. In his earlier work, however—which
is highly concerned with revitalising the canon of Western Marxism in
a North American context—his writing inevitably discusses the nature of
capitalism, reification and industrialisation in a similar manner to his larger
110 J. COGLE
influences. Fables of Aggression in particular is a reshuffling of the argu-

ments of the earlier theorists, framing high modernism in the same kinds
of contexts as that of Lukács, Adorno and Brecht.
Beyond this complicated negotiation process, Jameson must also
mediate between the Western Marxists and the landscape of contempo-
rary theory. In “Reflections on the Brecht-Lukács Debate”, Jameson is
highly concerned with how critics perceived Brecht and Lukács at the
time of its publication. The essay considers the development of poststruc-
turalism, as well as elaborating on the political nuances of an ongoing
Marxist reception of the two figures. For example:
It is Lukács as partisan, less of specific artistic style than of a particular

critical method, who is the focus of a new polemics today…. Lukács’s own
critical practice is in fact very much genre-orientated … and committed
to the mediation of the various forms of literary discourse, so that it is a
mistake to enlist him in the cause of a naïve mimetic position that encour-
ages us to discuss the events or characters of a novel, in the same way we
would look at “real” ones…. It is clear that as long as Lukács is used as a
rallying cry (or bogey man) in this particular methodological conflict, there
is not much likelihood of any measured assessment of his work…. Brecht,
meanwhile, is certainly much more easily rewritten in terms of concerns
of the present, in which he seems to address us directly in an unmediated
voice. [34, pp. 440–441]
Here, Jameson is particularly aware of the ways in which Lukács’ method

might be interpreted in a contemporary field, conceding several of the
weaknesses or incongruities with trends in academia at the time, but
stressing what Jameson sees as a misreading. Throughout his career, he
goes through this process of admitting to Lukács’ faults or unfashionable
attributes in order to reframe the concepts that are useful to his theo-
retical project. At times, Jameson’s work on modernism does not move
far beyond the initial ground of these early essays; it still wavers between
the binary positions of reification and subversion, or merely repositions
these tendencies in Weber’s theory of historical development. If we are to
follow Gartman, Jameson’s engagement with high modernism is missing
necessary nuances of uneven development and of cultural engagement.
If, instead, we see Jameson’s work as attached to this lineage of Western
Marxism—or position his earlier material more thoroughly within the
field of theory at the time—it becomes clear that his engagement has
enriched the earlier debates in a crucial manner. In the 1970s and 1980s,
his repositioning of these Western Marxists was crucial to the resurgence

of Marxism in the field of theory, but also redefined much of their work in
the process. In this manner, his material on high modernism has the effect
of reworking his theoretical forerunners into the context of poststruc-
tural thought and the field of theory, while aiming to remain committed
to the principles of his influences. Combined with the way the period’s
theorisation has remained intensely contested in contemporary theory,
high modernism inevitably becomes both elusive and highly complex in
Jameson’s own narrative of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Notes
1. It should be noted that Jameson is speaking of a broader concept or period
of time here, that of “modernity”, or the modernisation process that begins
several centuries earlier. Yet scholarly production on alternate modernities,
predominantly working in a postcolonial context, has also often concen-
trated on early twentieth-century literatures, using terms such as alternate
modernisms and geomodernisms.
2. It should be noted that the contemporary importance of Woolf to the
modernist canon is once again overlooked here.
3. Note that this refers to the “Introductory Note” found in the earlier, two
volume edition of The Ideologies of Theory, not the later, single volume
edition predominantly cited throughout this book.
References
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of Globalization.” In On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalism, edited
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CHAPTER 4
Jameson and Post-war Literature:

Postmodernism, Utopia and the Collective
Fredric Jameson’s theories of postmodernism have had an extensive

impact on scholarly discussions of post-war literature. As Amy Hunger-
ford outlined in 2010, “critics such as Fredric Jameson, Brian McHale,
Linda Hutcheon, Jean-François Lyotard, and others have defined the
period by the … fractured narratives, ironic play, and aesthetic virtu-
osity of writers like Pynchon, Gaddis, Acker, DeLillo, and Barth and have
looked to the economic substructures of culture as a way of understanding
these aesthetic developments” [1, p. xix]. Hungerford contrasts these
dominant trends in postmodern literary studies with a newer group of
scholars including herself, Daniel Grausam, Mark McGurl, and Timothy
Parrish. This group has aimed to move away from readings that concen-
trate on the economic or political dimensions of late capitalism. Within
this cohort there has instead been a focus on notions of identity, spir-
ituality and trauma in postmodernist literature. Despite Hungerford
positioning Jameson in contrast to these newer lines of enquiry, it remains
that he has rarely engaged with postmodern literature in any depth.
Across his career, he has consistently avoided discussing what he calls the
“high literary novel” after modernism.
If high-modernist literature remains somewhat ambiguous within
Jameson’s larger categories of history and literary development, the
postmodern novel often occupies an even more marginal position. As
discussed earlier in this book, the novel form remains the predominant
focus of Jameson’s interpretive practice when discussing the nineteenth

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54824-7_4
116 J. COGLE
century and the modernist period. When he begins to concentrate on

postmodernity, however, the novel becomes less central to his theoret-
ical project. In Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(1984), Jameson discusses the architect John Portman and Andy Warhol
at length. In comparison, his engagements with Thomas Pynchon and
William S. Burroughs are only short asides. In this work, Jameson theo-
rises that changes to a variety of Western cultural forms reflect global
political and economic developments. The marginalised position that
literature occupies within this context sees Jameson less interested in
the novel as cultural material. This pivot away from his earlier literary
focus continues for more than a decade. This is particularly evident
in his books published throughout the 1990s: Signatures of the Visible
(1990), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991),
The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), The Seeds of Time (1994) and The
Cultural Turn (1998). These texts either discuss postmodernism in a
general sense—with little engagement with the literary—or concentrate
almost exclusively on cinema. In 2002, Jameson published A Singular
Modernity, which signalled a return to literary studies in earnest. His
next major work, Archaeologies of the Future (2005), continued in this
fashion. During this period, however, his lack of interest in canonical post-
modernist authors remained. More recently, The Antinomies of Realism
(2013) has included discussions of contemporary authors such as David
Mitchell, but Jameson does not see a novel such as Cloud Atlas (2004)
in relationship to any canonical post-war texts. Elsewhere, he makes
frequent but cursory mentions of certain postmodern authors including
Burroughs, E. L. Doctorow and Pynchon. While these do not often
represent sustained engagements, they provide some clues to Jameson’s
views on postmodern literature. Running alongside these discussions of
the postmodern literary novel, he has also produced a range of material
on other kinds of post-war texts. Here the generic forms of the science
fiction and detective novel have often interested him in ways that the
high-literary novel no longer does.
This chapter will seek to delineate how Jameson has positioned these
varying literary forms throughout his career. The first section will concen-
trate on the limitations he has placed on the high-literary postmodern
novel, and how these have influenced his broader conceptualisations of
the period. Through this analysis, I will question whether elements of his
work may still be useful for contemporary criticism that has pursued a
more diverse understanding of postmodern literature. The second section
4 JAMESON AND POST-WAR LITERATURE … 117
will consider how Jameson’s readings of generic fiction articulate major

notions of his theoretical project, such as cognitive mapping and utopian
desire. Through this discussion, the chapter will outline the ways in which
his textual preferences influence his theoretical project. While this work
on generic fiction frequently constructs another set of problematic formal,
generic or political boundaries, this chapter will conclude by considering
his more recent work on contemporary generic forms, and the extent to
which Jameson’s categorising operations have become more fluid over the
past decade. This chapter will thus aim to illustrate the extent to which his
later material might reconcile with ongoing developments in postcolonial
studies, as well as to discuss how his more recent categories of the collec-
tive and discussions of the future offer new opportunities for interpretive
work.
High Literature in Postmodernity

Jameson sees Burroughs, Don DeLillo, Doctorow and Pynchon, amongst
others, as postmodern “high literature”. The authors he mentions are
similar to the ones Hungerford lists above. Critics have historically
grouped them in a category of postmodernist literature, although more
recently scholars have developed other terminology. In this manner,
scholars have begun to use categories such as “metafiction” or “the Amer-
ican post-war novel”. In contrast, Jameson stresses these authors’ debt
to high modernism. While he has occasionally discussed a sense that
postmodernity witnesses the blurring of high and low culture, he also
claims that authors such as Pynchon and Doctorow continue in a lineage
of “residual elite culture in our own postmodern age” [2, p. 152]. As
this book has demonstrated so far, Jameson’s textual interests often align
with a decidedly conventional, “high literary” version of the canon. By
the time of postmodernity, however, this sense of cultural division has
become problematic for Jameson. Despite their classification as high-
literary figures, the postmodernists are unable to escape the reification
of the cultural sphere. Jameson notes that the fiction “is popular: maybe
not in mid-Western towns, but in the dominant world of fashion and
mass media. That can only mean … that there has come to be some-
thing socially useful about art from the point of view of the existing
socio-economic structure; or something deeply suspect about it” [3,
pp. 413–414]. The utopian gesture afforded to James Joyce and other
modernists is entirely absent here. In contrast, the postmodernists write
118 J. COGLE
within a culture that treats literature predominantly as a commodity, even

as they remain beholden to certain outdated, high-modernist modes.
Despite his ambivalence towards this kind of fiction, however, Jameson
regularly mentions canonical postmodern authors in order to provide
brief, instructive examples of the field. He describes Pynchon’s The Crying
of Lot 49 (1966) as a “fundamental paradigm”, for example [4, p. 388].
He has also written on Doctorow on a few occasions. While claiming to
enjoy novels such as Ragtime (1975) and The Book of Daniel (1971),
Jameson also focuses on their articulation of a specifically postmodern
problem—the impossibility of representing history. He also appears to
continue to consume this type of literature: he has mentioned David
Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) as well as the stories of Alexander
Kluge, amongst others [see 4, p. 386; 5, pp. 187–192]. On occasion,
Jameson has also claimed the French nouveau roman is “the last signif-
icant innovation in the novel” [2, p. xv]. He has only worked on the
novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, however, in a few short essays. We should
also note that Jameson establishes his interest in the nouveau roman
well before his early articles on postmodernism. In this regard, Jameson’s
publications prior to 1983 become important texts when considering his
engagement with the postmodern novel.
While Jameson’s essays in the 1980s provided comprehensive artic-
ulations of postmodernity, his work throughout the 1970s had already
outlined many key theories relating to the historical period. This is
obscured, however, by the fact that postmodernity and postmodernism
were emerging concepts when his initial discussions of authors such as
Pynchon and Robbe-Grillet were being published. In these moments,
Jameson does not often use the term postmodernity, but still discusses the
historical moment in a manner that reflects his later articles. In Marxism
and Form, for example, he discusses a new “coherent culture with which
we are all familiar: John Cage’s music, Andy Warhol’s movies, novels
by Burroughs, plays by Beckett, Godard, camp, Norman O. Brown,
psychedelic experiences; and no critique can have any binding force which
does not begin by submitting to the fascination of all these things as styl-
izations of reality” [3, p. 413]. At this point, these kinds of texts still have
an aesthetic and political potential for Jameson. He claims that “insofar
as we are Americans, none of us can fail to react to such things as pop art
which admirably express the tangible and material realities, the specificity
of that American life which is ours” [3, p. 414]. Later, when Jameson
discusses pop art in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capi-
talism, he claims, “Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes … no longer
speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh’s footgear; indeed,
I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all” [2, p. 8].
We can connect this more open discussion of postmodern authors to
the looser definitions of modernism and postmodernism that Jameson
works with throughout the period. In “Modernism and Its Repressed;
or, Robbe-Grillet as Anti-Colonialist” (1976), for example, he uses the
term modernism throughout. He will later describe Robbe-Grillet specif-
ically as a postmodernist author. In “On Raymond Chandler” (1970),
Jameson likewise states that Robbe-Grillet and Vladimir Nabokov are
both “chief practitioners of art-for-art’s sake in the recent novel” [6,
p. 66]. He will later see Nabokov as contributing predominantly to the
late modernist period. Similarly, in “Metacommentary” (1971), Jameson
describes Burroughs’s Naked Lunch as an example of the emerging “plot-
less” novel [7, p. 12]. Later, in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture”
(1979), this focus will shift. It is here that Jameson describes Pynchon as
producing “post-modernist literary texts” [8, p. 14]. Jameson may make
several comments that suggest an ironic distance from these new literary
forms in the 1970s, but he is still somewhat interested in discussing
specific novels and authors. By the early 1990s and the publication of
the book Postmodernism, however, he has a strongly defined sense of
the period and his interest in the kind of North American post-war
novel represented by Pynchon and others has declined. Jameson discusses
Nabokov on occasion and writes briefly on the nouveau roman in a short
chapter in Postmodernism. Authors such as Burroughs, on the other hand,
rarely appear in Jameson’s work.
The fact that Jameson has not typically discussed the postmodern
novel in depth, however, allows for a reappraisal of this cultural form’s
relationship to his understanding of postmodernity. As discussed above,
scholars such as Amy Hungerford and Timothy Parrish have worked
towards new readings of post-war literary criticism—arguing for a move
away from Jameson’s conceptualisation of the period in the process.
Hungerford, for example, argues for scholarship that “sidesteps the
cultural materialist accounts of postmodernism that have been so powerful
in defining the field—specifically, Fredric Jameson’s argument about
the relationship between culture and late capitalism in Postmodernism”
[9, p. 413]. Yet, as I will discuss further below, scholars continue to
produce illuminating work on the post-war novel while borrowing from
120 J. COGLE
Jameson’s work on postmodernity. Contemporary criticism must now

operate from a different historical perspective to Jameson’s initial work on
postmodernism. This is especially evident in work that discusses the post-
postmodern, which does not necessarily “helplessly iterate and perpetually
enact Jameson’s concern that aesthetic creation and commodity produc-
tion have become the same thing”, as Timothy Parrish claims [10,
p. 646]. Given that Jameson’s work on postmodernity often ignores the
literature of the period, it would also seem relevant to discuss how the
novel functions in this historical context in comparison with architecture,
film and visual art. This is especially relevant when considering repre-
sentations of interiority or personal political engagement. At this stage,
and despite his impact on the field, a further consideration of Jameson’s
characterisations of postmodernity and its literature seems necessary.
Jameson has often argued that criticism should not concentrate on
aesthetic worth. For example, in Postmodernism, he claims
I write as a relatively enthusiastic consumer of postmodernism.… I like the

architecture and a lot of the newer visual work.… The music is not bad
to listen to, or the poetry to read; the novel is the weakest of the newer
cultural areas and is considerably excelled by its narrative counterparts in
film and video (at least the high literary novel is; subgeneric narratives,
however, are very good, indeed, and in the Third World of course all this
falls out very differently).…
These are tastes, giving rise to opinions; they have little to do with the
analysis of the function of such a culture and how it got to be that way.
[2, pp. 298–299]
In this moment, Jameson claims that his enjoyment of specific forms has
no influence on the theoretical frameworks he applies to the period. He
then moves on to critique scholars who have focused on the aesthetic
worth of postmodern cultural material—particularly those that compare
postmodernism to realism or modernism. This tendency is perhaps best
illustrated in “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Post-
modernism Debate” (1984), where he discusses the contrasting views
of Lyotard and Manfredo Tafuri. Here, Jameson’s intention is to place
differing critical positions in a broader historical context:
Most of the political positions which we have found to inform what is most
often conducted as an aesthetic debate are in reality moralizing ones that
seek to develop final judgments on the phenomenon of postmodernism.…
But a genuinely historical and dialectical analysis of such phenomena …

cannot afford the impoverished luxury of such absolute moralizing judg-
ments.… The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to
the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile
celebration of it is complacent and corrupt. [11, p. 29]
While Jameson’s descriptions of postmodernity in terms of capitalist

development and “depthlessness” are now more well-known, this argu-
ment represented a significant shift in scholarly approaches to postmod-
ernism at the time. Despite this imperative, however, his approach to the
postmodern novel demonstrates how his theoretical frameworks often
mirror his preferences for specific texts. His discussion of authors such
as Doctorow and Pynchon, for example, frequently outlines the limited
extent to which the postmodern novel is able to perform any kind of
meaningful critique of the historical and political situation of late capi-
talism. From Jameson’s Marxist position, this lack of political efficacy is
obviously a negative and critical assessment. In this regard, there is a sense
that his articulation of political possibility in postmodern cultural material
aligns with his own aesthetic preferences. This would appear to contra-
dict his argument that discussions of postmodernity should aim to ignore
notions of cultural worth. As discussed earlier in this book, critics have
often portrayed this aspect of Jameson’s work as a nostalgia for older
cultural forms. By instead concentrating on how his literary interests are
connected to his broader depictions of postmodernity, however, we might
come to a more nuanced understanding of how his engagement with
cultural forms impacts on his theoretical frameworks for the period.
Throughout his career, Jameson has considered scholarly and popular
reception of cultural forms. In this capacity, he often aligns the acceptance
and proliferation of certain texts and genres with their relationship to
the political unconscious. This is illustrated in the essay “Reification and
Utopia in Mass Culture”, in which he compares the film Jaws (1975) with
the Peter Benchley novel from which it was adapted. His reading shows
how modifications to certain major characters allow the film to represent
a different set of class conflicts:
[The novel] provides us with a striking illustration of a whole work of

displacement by which the written narrative of an essentially class fantasy
has been transformed, in the Hollywood product, into something quite
different.… Gone is the whole … aristocratic brooding over death, along
122 J. COGLE
with the erotic rivalry in which class antagonisms were dramatized; the
Hooper of the film is nothing but a technocratic whiz-kid, no tragic hero
but instead a good-natured creature of grants … and scientific know-
how. But Brody has also undergone an important modification: he is no
longer the small-town island boy … rather he has been transformed into a
retired cop from New York City, relocating on Nantucket in an effort to
flee the hassle of urban crime, race war, and ghettoization. The figure of
Brody now therefore introduces overtones … of law-and-order, rather than
yankee shrewdness, and functions as a tv police-show hero transposed into
this apparently more sheltered but in reality equally contradictory milieu
which is the great American summer vacation. [8, pp. 27–28]
For Jameson, this more broadly resonant subtext ensures the film has
a wider appeal than the paperback, and has a major impact on the
film’s importance as a text. Its position as an early example of the
“blockbuster” and continued prominence in our reception of film history
becomes tied to its expression of certain twentieth-century tendencies
and tensions. Elsewhere, Jameson commonly discusses a broad variety
of textual elements using a narrative of emergence and regression. He
frequently discusses character tropes, formal innovations or symbolic
gestures using this framework, in order to demonstrate their relation-
ship to the historical situation that surrounds them. Even though these
moments are often revelatory in Jameson’s work, they often demonstrate
how his personal tastes—particularly when discussing the novel—impact
on his sense of historical change. High literature’s limited ability to
represent postmodernity becomes entwined with its apparent decline
in prominence in popular culture and other cultural hierarchies. For
Jameson, the novels of Burroughs, Doctorow, Pynchon and others no
longer articulate the changed cultural landscape in the same way a film
like Jaws can. The subsequent loss of importance of this kind of novel in
the cultural sphere reflects these limitations. Elsewhere, Jameson argues
against scholarship that valorises or diminishes periods of literature in rela-
tionship to one another. Nevertheless, he has typically framed his interest
in the realist or high-modernist novel in relation to the ability of their
formal qualities to express the political unconscious of the period. While
he might argue that judgements of cultural worth or aesthetic value
should not inform Marxist criticism, it remains that his work often ties
discussions of formal innovation with the novel’s ability to express deeper
political realities. As such, his theory must be intrinsically influenced by
notions of taste, if we are to consider the form of a novel, its plot or its
subtext as in any way tied to our aesthetic appreciation of a text.
These aesthetic preferences lead to several moments where Jameson
restricts the conceptual valences of the literary novel in favour of more
generic forms. For example, in “Philip K. Dick, In Memoriam” (1982),
he states that it is “the inauthenticity … of Science Fiction that gives it
one signal advantage over modernist high literature. The latter can show
us everything about the individual psyche and its subjective experience
and alienation, save the essential—the logic of stereotypes, reproductions
and depersonalization in which the individual is held in our own time”
[4, p. 348].1 This argument does elide the sense that novels by authors
like DeLillo and Doctorow are frequently concerned with stereotypes
or generic character tropes. For instance, DeLillo’s White Noise (1985)
focuses on the dissonance that Jack Gladney experiences as he moves
through—and attempts to act in—his suburban environment. His efforts
to occupy a position of authority as an academic and father are persis-
tently undercut by the meaninglessness and absurdity of the postmodern
world he inhabits. Jameson also works to limit the extent to which the
postmodern novel can do political work. In Postmodernism, he claims
that Doctorow’s Ragtime cannot recreate the past, rather “it can only
‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about that past.… If there is any
realism left here, it is a “realism” that is meant to derive from the shock
of … slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation
in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop
images and simulacra of that history” [2, p. 25]. Jameson often defines
postmodern literature in terms of what it lacks: here it is a Lukácsian
sense of mimetic realism that has the ability to map society and history in
politically productive fashion. In this context, Ragtime becomes a literary
example of the “nostalgia film”. For Jameson, films that recreate the
past have the effect of replacing a sense of historical development with
“the history of aesthetic style” [2, p. 20]. In these prescriptive moments,
Jameson’s work limits the critical capacity of post-war cultural material, as
well as its ability to conceptualise specific problems of the postmodern.
This tendency is perhaps most obvious in his discussion of Andy
Warhol. Jameson claims Warhol’s work expresses a problem of postmoder-
nity, yet does not allow for the sense that Warhol’s work is an articulation
or investigation of that problem. In Postmodernism, Jameson claims
that Warhol’s screen-prints, “which explicitly foreground the commodity
fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical
124 J. COGLE
political statements. If they are not that, then one would surely want to
know why, and one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously
about the possibilities of political … art in the postmodern period” [2,
p. 9]. In this moment, Jameson accepts that these texts are about the role
of media in postmodern society and the commodification of the image,
but refutes their political power. Even as they express a particular compo-
nent of the historical situation, this reading is limited by the fact that
Jameson does not find the works “powerful”. The Crying of Lot 49 is a
novel that similarly delineates certain aspects of the postmodern moment.
Pynchon’s novel conceptualises specific problems regarding language and
its relationship with truth or reality. A novel that performs this kind of
work does not necessarily align with “the emergence of a new kind of
flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal
sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms” in
the same way that a “nostalgia film” might [2, p. 9].
As discussed above, we need to consider the historical moment in
which Jameson is working. At this stage, postmodernism and postmoder-
nity are not as well developed as concepts, and scholars do not always
clearly distinguish between the two terms. Jameson will eventually make
clearer distinctions between postmodernism as a cultural form and post-
modernity as a historical period [see 12, pp. 101–102]. Nevertheless, the
notion of a cultural dominant in his work needs further consideration. For
Jameson, the historical situation of postmodernity has a decisive influence
on the cultural material of the period. He uses the film American Graf-
fiti (1973) as an illustration of the depthlessness he sees in postmodernist
cinema, given its flattening of history into a re-creation of late 1950s
and early 1960s aesthetics. While we might categorise the film as post-
modern in this regard, the film still uses a coming of age narrative that
emphasises a series of more traditional cultural norms—particularly ones
related to interpersonal relationships and education. Even in this period
of postmodernity, these values remain dominant. In contrast, Jameson’s
notion of a “waning of affect” is only an emergent cultural trend. Simi-
larly, a major Hollywood film of this kind is inevitably more pervasive
than metafiction by authors such as Pynchon. Further to this, the post-
modernist novel often works to engage with and critique the kinds of
cultural values that a film like American Graffiti presents to the viewer as
known and accepted. As mentioned above, novels by DeLillo, Doctorow
and Pynchon are not typically valorisations of postmodernity’s loss of
meaning. Even if there is pleasure or enjoyment to be derived from
the irony of postmodern depthlessness in post-war fiction, these novels

are often also engaged with the conceptual problems of the period. For
Jameson, however, this critical function of postmodern literature does not
set the novel apart from the nostalgia film.
To understand this tendency, we might also look at the academic
debates that Jameson is engaging with. In Postmodernism, for example,
he describes a contemporaneous period of cultural theory and literary
studies that remains heavily influenced by poststructuralist theory:
It must not have the appearance of making primary statements.… This

reflects the widespread feeling that inasmuch as everything we utter is a
moment in a larger chain or context, all statements that seem to be primary
are in fact only links in some larger “text.” … This feeling also entails
another one … namely, that we can never go far enough back to make
primary statements, that there are no conceptual … beginnings, and that
the doctrine of … foundations is somehow intolerable as a testimony to
the inadequacies of the human mind. [2, p. 392]
Jameson has made later concessions to the discourse of theory. In 2009,

he stated, “I remain committed … to the ongoing significance and vitality
of that discourse called theory, which I have identified elsewhere as the
construction of a language beyond that of traditional philosophy, and
offering at least one possible contemporary equivalent of what used to be
called the dialectic” [7, p. x]. At the time of Postmodernism, however, he
is more wary of aspects of poststructuralist theory that he defines as anti-
interpretive or anti-historicist. Seen from this vantage point, it becomes
understandable why he is disinclined to discuss high-postmodernist novels
that often seem to be in conversation with poststructuralism. Limiting
these novels to their expression of poststructuralist ideas similar to that
of Barthes or Foucault, however, is a repudiation of their other qualities.
While Jameson has called for more nuanced and expansive readings of
authors such as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Émile Zola, his brief
and prescriptive engagements with the postmodern novel often work to
limit the interpretive possibilities.
In his later work on Thomas Pynchon, Casey Shoop sketches an
accepted reading of The Crying of Lot 49 that aligns with Jameson’s
approach to postmodern literature. Shoop claims that Pynchon’s novel
has “become something of a postmodern procedural, with the novel
126 J. COGLE
modeling its own methods of interpretation, such that its refusal to

mean has been taken, paradoxically, for its Meaning. Oedipa is captive
to the enchantments of signification itself.… This focus on textuality is
punctuated by the novel’s famous, final refusal to mean” [13, p. 54].
Shoop writes against this type of interpretation by engaging with the
text’s notion of paranoia. He claims that “restoring Pynchon to history
and history to Pynchon reveals that paranoia is not simply a condition
of interpretive dysfunction or illness but the prospective ground of new
political agency in his work and in the period more broadly” [13, p. 52].
Shoop traces a history of the New Right in California that is visible in
The Crying of Lot 49, at the same time as demonstrating how the Right
adapts to the loss of meaning experienced in post-war Western society.
Shoop notes how the Right’s approach to this issue differs to that of the
Left, which has the “tendency to posit the mere knowledge that truth and
reference claims have become problematic as itself a progressive political
notion” [13, p. 58]. In contrast, conservatism becomes a binary, paranoid
framework for understanding the world, as exemplified by the Right-wing
operatives found in Pynchon’s novels:
The paranoid style of the New Right concedes the possibility that there
are other orders of being which threaten and perhaps control this one, so
that it needs actively to cultivate its own images in order to compete.
More to the point, this complementary anxiety on the right is vital to
an understanding of paranoia in Pynchon’s California novels, which span
the period of Reagan’s ascendance. Paranoia is not merely the occasion for
an allegorical exercise in hermeneutic uncertainty but also an exploration
of a precise cultural-historical situation: the 1960s California of The Crying
of Lot 49 is the state of representational breakdown.… As such, California
was also the place where the Right reacted most powerfully to this crisis,
offering counter projections to recontain diversity within the logic of cold
war binarism.… Pynchon’s parodic portrayals of New Right activism reveal
it to be anything but traditional in its engagement with this crisis. [13,
p. 65].
For Shoop, The Crying of Lot 49 demonstrates how the Right mobilises
representations of the 1950s in this new paranoid world view. Tellingly,
Shoop references Postmodernism, particularly Jameson’s sense of the “shift
from the realities of the 1950s to the representation of that rather
different thing, the ‘fifties’” [2, p. 281]. Shoop claims that The Crying
of Lot 49’s “parodic use of cultural signifiers to index the previous era …
suggests that the ‘fifties’ already belongs within the quotation marks that
would offset its status as representation” [13, p. 66n].
As such, Shoop’s reading aligns with Jameson’s reservations about
poststructuralist interpretations of postmodern texts. He uses some of
Jameson’s broader ideas regarding the period, but comes from a more
contemporary perspective. In doing so, Shoop works through the tensions
between historical modes that Jameson discusses in The Political Uncon-
scious . This allows for more nuance than the “eternal present” that
Jameson discusses in Postmodernism. The reading also works to position
Jameson’s work in better alignment with scholars such as Daniel Grausam.
In the last decade, Grausam has claimed that while “our sense that the
post-1945 American canon has solidified … our categories for analyzing
the period are otherwise still taking shape” [14, p. 401]. Grausam and
other critics like Hungerford and Parrish have worked to combat read-
ings that reiterate some of Jameson’s most famous notions of the period
and its literature. This group of scholars has focused on the psychological,
racial and spiritual aspects of the post-war novel, amongst other topics.
In doing so, they have aimed at “complicating these grand narratives of
an age and a literature axiomatically sceptical of grand narratives” [14,
p. 399]. While emphasising the importance of these new kinds of read-
ings, Grausam argues against Jameson’s notion of historical depthlessness.
Shoop’s interpretation of The Crying of Lot 49, however, articulates how
Jameson’s writing on postmodernism—as well as historical change more
broadly—might remain important for our engagement with the period’s
literature.
Further to this, Shoop’s work on Pynchon highlights a limitation of
Jameson’s engagement with postmodern cultural material. Considering
Jameson’s resistance to specific aspects of poststructuralism, we can see
how he might be less interested in the postmodern novel. Nevertheless,
while Jameson points to the restrictions in a scholarly discourse domi-
nated by poststructuralist ideas, his work does little to expand how we
might think about postmodern literature beyond this kind of interpre-
tation. Even novels with more overt political intentions are restricted
in this capacity in Jameson’s work. This is particularly noticeable in his
brief discussions of Doctorow. In early readings of Ragtime and The
Book of Daniel , scholars were predominantly interested in describing their
postmodern aspects [see 15, 16, 17]. For example, both Paul Levine
and John G. Parks focused on Ragtime and its integration of historical
figures into a fictional narrative, as well as how the novel foregrounds
128 J. COGLE
its own textuality. Jameson’s reading in Postmodernism performs many

of the same operations, where he states that Doctorow is “the epic poet
of the disappearance of the American radical past, of the suppression of
older traditions and moments of the American tradition: no one with left
sympathies can read these splendid novels without a poignant distress that
is an authentic way of confronting our own current political dilemmas
in the present” [2, pp. 24–25]. Despite this attention to the political
elements of Doctorow’s novels, Jameson ties Ragtime particularly to his
sense that the postmodern novel is unable to represent the past, or to
critique the contemporary historical mode. As discussed above, within
the context of Jameson’s Marxist theoretical frameworks, this lack of a
critical component diminishes the work. In this capacity, his work on post-
modern literature mirrors Lukacs’ work on modernism. Jameson states
that “Ragtime remains the most peculiar and stunning monument to the
aesthetic situation engendered by the disappearance of the historical refer-
ent” [2, p. 25]. This argument works in opposition to a reading like Linda
Hutcheon’s, who foregrounds the political intent of Ragtime as well as its
engagement with history [see 18, pp. 61–62]. Instead, Jameson empha-
sises that Ragtime is a “seemingly realistic novel [which] is in reality a
nonrepresentational work that combines fantasy signifiers from a variety
of ideologemes in a kind of hologram” [2, p. 23]. For Jameson, this inau-
thentic realism inevitably reduces the text’s ability to produce any kind of
cognitive map for the reader. While this kind of reading points to the
difficulty for cultural material to perform political work in the period
of postmodernity, it also fails to engage with the text’s own contem-
porary context. For example, Jameson briefly discusses the character of
Coalhouse in Ragtime as an example of postmodern intertextuality. Coal-
house’s name and narrative closely mirror that of the German novella
Michael Kohlhauss (1810), but the reader is invited to make connections,
beyond other literary works. Coalhouse is a black musician who forms
a militant group after having his car torched by a local fire chief. Set in
the first decade of the twentieth century, the text nevertheless engages
with history more contemporaneous to the novel’s production, including
the Civil Rights movement or the establishment of the Black Panther
Party. Similarly, the narrative of the character Tateh asks the reader to
reflect on the industrial production of cultural material in the twentieth
century. Jameson instead reinforces a poststructuralist reading of the text,
by claiming the novel makes the same “repudiation of interpretation
… fundamental [to] poststructuralist theory” [2, p. 23]. While arguing
against this type of analysis, Jameson claims that Doctorow’s novels only
have the capacity to reinforce poststructuralist theories of culture.
Doctorow’s novels highlight another aspect of postmodern experience
similarly ignored in Jameson’s readings of postmodern texts. The subject
does not necessarily enter into postmodernity’s crisis of the real with
a mere “waning” of affect, but often with a sense of anxiety. Shoop’s
work details how right-wing operatives are well positioned to capitalise
on this anxiety, while the subject’s desire for unity is discussed at length
in critical theory. This critical work often concentrates on problems of
subjective experience and has drawn extensively on the work of Lacan, as
well as a text Jameson references often: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Jameson references
Lacan’s notion of schizophrenia to describe postmodernity, but his work
often downplays problems of subjectivity in his famous articulations of
the period. As seen in his discussion of films such as American Graffiti
and elsewhere, Jameson sees nostalgia as working against the possibility of
a cognitive map. Yet, he does not engage with the reasons why nostalgia
becomes so prevalent in postmodern cultural material, or the psycholog-
ical or political desires behind this change. Thinking through this notion
of nostalgia, however, might allow us to frame the notion of history that
Doctorow’s novel present us with in a more complex fashion. In doing
so, we might arrive at the more developed sense of historical mapping
that Jameson sees in realism and high modernism. Instead, this opportu-
nity is minimised in his reading of Doctorow’s novels. By concentrating
predominantly on Ragtime, Jameson also elides a detailed discussion
of postmodern subjectivity. Ragtime’s characters are often presented as
archetypal. The main family members being named “Father”, “Mother”
and so on, while their interiority is presented to the reader with a sense
of distance. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel , on the other hand, is a
postmodern text very much preoccupied with notions of subjectivity and
identity. Even as it plays with notions of intertextuality or representations
of the past and history—and is thoroughly postmodern in these terms—it
remains focused on how subjectivity, trauma and late capitalism intersect.
In The Book of Daniel , Daniel analyses the world of late capitalism
as he travels to different parts of the United States. He critiques the
naivety and hypocrisy of various countercultural values, as the same time
as performing symptomatic readings of a hegemonic mainstream culture.
He is particularly interested in advertising, as well as the aesthetics of
retail environments. For example: “In the window an advertising cutout
130 J. COGLE
faded from the sun: a modern housewife, smartly turned out in a dress
that reaches almost to her ankles. She has her hand on the knob of a
radio and does not look at it but out at you.… She is a slim … woman
for whom the act of turning on an orange radio is enormous pleasure”
[19, p. 38]. In this regard, we might read Daniel’s ironic descriptions of
North American social values as quintessentially postmodern. If we pay
attention to Daniel’s marginality in society, however, these postmodern
elements acquire an additional complexity. Daniel often draws attention
to the pretences of a culture that claims to provide “liberty and justice
for all” but has also executed his parents after a secretive and seemingly
unconstitutional trial. In this fashion, the novel mixes postmodern irony
with deep-seated trauma and paranoia. Over the course of the novel,
Daniel becomes better able to recognise these aspects of his psyche, as
well as to acknowledge his sister’s depression. At one stage in this narra-
tive development, his play with language and meaning abruptly breaks
into abstract free association:
“Treason against the U.S. shall consist only in levying war against them,
or in adhering to their enemies, giving them Aid & Comfort.… The deci-
sion to impose constitutional safeguards on treason prosecutions formed
part of a broad emerging American tradition of liberalism.… No American
has ever been executed for treason against his country,” says Nathaniel
Weyl, TREASON: THE STORY OF DISLOYALTY AND BETRAYAL IN
AMERICAN HISTORY, published in the year 1950. I say IF THIS BE
TREASON MAKE THE MOST OF IT!
If this bee is tristante make the mort of it
If this be the reason make a mulch of it.
If this brie is in season drink some milk with it. [19, p. 168]
That this moment occurs in a discussion of treason and the legal processes
that impacted on his parent’s execution emphasises the relationship
between Daniel’s trauma and his sense that language and culture are faulty
constructs. As the novel comes to a conclusion, Daniel begins to make
decisions and acknowledge his emotions. This stands in contrast to the
beginning of the narrative, where Daniel analyses his family history and
remains removed from the action. In the last section of the text, Daniel
attends his sister’s funeral and pays several men to read the Kaddish. The
men talk over each other as they pray at the same time, creating a babble
of noise. In response, Daniel claims, “I think I am going to be able to cry”
[19, p. 302]. Language again becomes nonsensical, but in this moment is
also cathartic for Daniel. In Jameson’s most famous work on postmoder-

nity, he often seems to reduce the extent to which emotional experience
remains important to or even possible for the postmodern subject. The
Book of Daniel , on the other hand, demonstrates how our investment in
traditional values is persistent throughout this period. Its central character
has a familiar approach to postmodernity’s crisis of meaning, one that
foregrounds detachment and irony. Yet, Daniel’s traumatic relationship
to the cultural dominant demonstrates the extent to which these tradi-
tional values continue to impact on our interiority and subconscious in a
significant fashion. Postmodern novels such as DeLillo’s White Noise or
Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick (1997) also investigate these competing tenden-
cies in the postmodern subject. In this regard, postmodern literature
is able to delineate certain aspects of postmodern experience unavail-
able to Jameson’s most commonly referenced examples drawn from film,
architecture or science fiction.
As such, there remains an opportunity for these readings of post-
modern subjectivity—or the political and cultural moments this kind of
novel focuses on—to interact with the historicised understanding of post-
modernism that Jameson articulates. Postmodern literary studies might,
for example, relate the work of Grausam on postmodern fiction and fear
of nuclear war with the larger notions of cultural and economic devel-
opment found in Jameson. Similarly, Jameson’s narrative of historical
development might add to Robert L. McLaughlin’s discussion of the
return of “fiction that is placed in the social world” in what he calls “post-
postmodern” literature [20, p. 59]. Jameson has often argued against
criticism that reiterates Shoop’s sense of the “postmodern procedural”.
Nevertheless, his limiting of the post-war novel has had the effect of
denying interpretations of Pynchon and Doctorow as discussed above.
In doing so, Hungerford and others have often found it necessary to
write against a Jamesonian view of postmodernity. This restriction of
the conceptual work that the postmodern novel can do, however, seems
to be strongly linked to Jameson’s own personal preferences—as well
as the somewhat negative perspective from which he writes during the
1980s and 1990s. With this in mind, a broader set of potential read-
ings emerges, whereby analysis of post-war fiction can remain invested
in Jameson’s theoretical and historical frameworks while integrating a
wider set of interests, as well as a different historical vantage point. While
a text like Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief makes efforts to focus on
elements of post-war fiction less related to a Marxist sense of class and
132 J. COGLE
economics, Shoop’s work shows how the postmodern novel, previously

viewed as ahistorical, expresses a variety of cultural and political changes.
Throughout his career, Jameson has claimed that interpretation of texts
must be thoroughly historicised. While he has often provided these kinds
of readings of realist novels in particular, he has not done so for post-
modern literature. Ironically, for scholars of the postmodern novel to
perform a similar kind of operation, they must move past Jameson’s
influential articulations of the period.
Jameson and Genre Fiction: The Limits of Utopia

More recently, Jameson has sought to reframe these early descriptions
of postmodernity, both obliquely in The Antinomies of Realism and
more explicitly in essays such as “The Aesthetics of Singularity” (2015).
Nevertheless, this work has not extended to reconsider the canonical post-
modern novels of Pynchon and others. Throughout his career, however,
Jameson has regularly offered a differing vantage point from which to
consider the post-war period. In this manner, his discussions of generic
fiction have commonly served as a counterpoint to his more pessimistic
portrayals of postmodern cultural material. Jameson concentrates on two
specific types of genre novel in earnest: that of detective fiction and,
more prominently, of science fiction. In both cases, these generic forms
offer elements of the cognitive mapping operation. For Jameson, cogni-
tive mapping is a process by which “we may again begin to grasp our
positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to
act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as
social confusion” [2, p. 54]. For example, he sees the detective fiction
of Raymond Chandler as a later iteration of the social mapping found
in realism, a procedure that is no longer available to high-postmodern
literature. Science fiction, on the other hand, provides a historical perspec-
tive not available to other postmodern texts. In contrast to his work on
Doctorow and the nostalgia film, Jameson claims that representations
of the future allow for a more dialectical view of the present moment.
He frames the science fiction novels of certain mid-twentieth-century
writers—Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin and Stanislaw Lem in partic-
ular—as providing this perspective. Jameson has produced a lengthier
consideration of the genre in one major text: Archaeologies of the Future:
The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005). The newer
material found in the work uses examples from a long history of utopian
and science fiction novels in order to discuss the limits of utopian imag-
ination and desire. We should note that Jameson remains cautious in
his privileging of these genres, and he often details the current difficul-
ties for mapping operations or utopian thought. Once again, however,
these operations rely on the construction of generic boundaries which he
attributes Marxist valences. The following section will explore Jameson’s
work on detective and science fiction in order to delineate the privi-
leged relationships they occupy within his theory, and to better define
his relationship to our own present.
“On Raymond Chandler” (1970) is Jameson’s first extended discus-
sion of genre fiction. Published a year before Marxism and Form, the
article is also one of his first engagements with postmodernity, although
he is several years away from using the term in his writing. Raymond
Chandler published the majority of his most celebrated novels before
the end of World War II. Nevertheless, Jameson sees their portrayals of
California—and Los Angeles in particular—as early descriptions of a new
social and cultural terrain: “By an accident of place, [Chandler’s] social
content anticipates the realities of the fifties and sixties. For Los Angeles is
already a kind of microcosm and forecast of the country as a whole: a new
centerless city, in which the various classes have lost touch with each other
because each is isolated in his own geographical compartment” [6, p. 69].
In the piece, Jameson contrasts detective fiction with contemporaneous
developments in high literature. He claims:
Since the War, the organic differences from region to region have been
increasingly obliterated by standardization; and the organic social unity
of each region has been increasingly fragmented and abstracted by the
new closed lives of the individual family units, by the breakdown of cities
and the dehumanization of transportation and of the media which lead
from one monad to another.… If there is a crisis in American literature at
present, it should be understood against the background of this ungrateful
social material, in which only trick shots can produce the illusion of life.
[6, p. 69]
In comparison, Jameson argues, “a case can be made for Chandler as a

painter of American life; not as a builder of those large-scale models of
the American experience which great literature offers, but rather in frag-
mentary pictures of setting and place, fragmentary perceptions which are
by some formal paradox somehow inaccessible to serious literature” [6,
134 J. COGLE
p 67]. For Jameson, the detective is a figure who traverses a range of

social and geographical terrain, offering a larger view of contemporary
society than most individual subjective experiences: “Since there is no
longer any privileged experience in which the whole of the social struc-
ture can be grasped, a figure must be invented who can be superimposed
on the society as a whole.… The detective … fills the demands of the
function of knowledge rather than that of lived experience: through him
we are able to see, to know, the society as a whole” [6, p. 69]. In this
manner, the essay represents an early consideration of cognitive mapping,
even as larger senses of global capitalist frameworks do not enter the
discussion. For Jameson, a sense of social disintegration in Western post-
modernity already presents several challenges for cognition and aesthetic
representation.
Jameson’s work on science fiction, meanwhile, began in earnest in the
mid-1970s, and the genre has become an important part of his theoretical
project. Critics consider Jameson’s early articles on science fiction—most
of which appeared in the journal Science Fiction Studies —as paradigmatic
work in the field. The articles include “World Reduction in Le Guin: The
Emergence of Utopian Narrative” (1975), “After Armageddon: Character
Systems in P. K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney” (1975) and “Progress versus
Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future” (1982). As John Duda notes,
literary criticism of science fiction was “a field that had barely been estab-
lished when … ‘Generic Discontinuities in SF: Brian Aldiss’ Starship’
… was first published in the second issue of the seminal journal Science
Fiction Studies ” [21, p. 1245]. In this initial material, Jameson concen-
trates on particular groups of science fiction authors. He is primarily
interested in “Golden Age” and “New Wave” writers working in the
1950s up until the 1970s. Throughout his career, Jameson discusses
major figures from these eras, such as Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, J. G.
Ballard, Dick, Le Guin, A. E. Van Vogt and many others. His work only
occasionally considers earlier examples of the genre. As mentioned in the
chapter on realism, he only offhandedly positions Mary Shelley’s Franken-
stein as science fiction’s inaugural text, and he rarely discusses figures such
as Jules Verne. Similarly, Jameson remains less interested in “hard science
fiction” and concentrates on more conceptual, psychological and exper-
imental novels. For example, in a discussion of science fiction’s Golden
Age, he claims: “Van Vogt’s work clearly prepares the way for that of the
greatest of all Science Fiction writers, Philip K. Dick, whose … stories are
inconceivable without the opening onto that play of unconscious mate-

rials and fantasy dynamics released by Van Vogt, and very different in
spirit from the more hard-science aesthetic ideologies of his contempo-
raries” [4, p. 315]. Jameson’s appraisal of Dick, and his ongoing interest
in the later fiction of Le Guin, Lem and William Gibson, reinforces this
interest in science fiction’s conceptual abilities, rather than its engagement
with technological development.
In much of this early material, Jameson concentrates on notions of the
present. He compares his chosen texts with high-literary examples and
reads the science fiction visions of the future as allegorical of contempo-
rary problems. For example, in “World Reduction in Le Guin”, he reads J.
G. Ballard’s novels as translating “both physical and moral dissolution into
the great ideological myth of entropy, in which the historic collapse of the
British Empire is projected outwards into some immense cosmic declara-
tion of the universe itself as well as of its molecular building blocks” [4,
p. 269]. From his earliest essays on science fiction, however, Jameson also
elevates the possibility for the genre to be productive in a Marxist sense.
In “Generic Discontinuity in Brian Aldiss’ Starship”, he discusses “one
of the supreme functions of SF as a genre, namely the ‘estrangement’, in
the Brechtian sense, of our culture and institutions—a shocked renewal
of our vision such that once again, and as though for the first time, we
are able to perceive their historicity and their arbitrariness, their profound
dependency on the accidents of man’s historical adventure” [4, p. 255].
The political component that science fiction acquires in these passages and
others—the potential to conceptualise and express the historical situation
of late capitalism—is substantially at odds with the limited set of possibil-
ities that Jameson attributes to cultural material in his later discussions of
postmodernity.
This initial spate of work on science fiction would conclude somewhat
with the publication of “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the
Future?” (1982). The essay is an early portrayal of the difficulties that
cultural material faces when representing the past. Jameson extrapolates
from Lukács’ work in The Historical Novel (1937), in order to discuss
contemporary texts: “What is original about Lukács’s book is not merely
[a] sense of the historical meaning of the emergence of this new genre,
but also … the profound historicity of the genre itself, its increasing inca-
pacity to register its content, the way in which, with Flaubert’s Salammbô
… it becomes emptied of its vitality and survives as a dead form” [4,
p. 285]. Jameson then interprets a primary example of the nostalgia
136 J. COGLE
film, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), in a similar manner. For

Jameson, “Flaubert’s Carthage and Kubrick’s eighteenth century, but also
the industrial turn of the century or the nostalgic 1930s or 1950s of
the American experience, find themselves emptied of their necessity, and
reduced to pretexts for so many glossy images” [4, p. 285]. Jameson
aligns the emergence of Jules Verne with “the moment in which the
historical novel as a genre ceases to be functional”, and discusses the social
function of imagined futures [4, p. 285]. Through this work, Jameson
argues, “the most characteristic SF does not seriously attempt to imagine
the ‘real’ future of our social system. Rather, its multiple mock futures
serve the quite different function of transforming our own present into
the determinate past of something yet to come” [4, p. 288]. In this
manner, Jameson considers how representations of the future invoke a
wider sense of the historical, rather than predominantly operating as a
commentary on capitalism’s present-day structures.
Congruent with Alexander Dunst’s narrative of historical possibility
within Jameson’s work of the last three decades, the publication of
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism signifies the
beginning of a reduced and limited engagement with genre fiction for
Jameson. Dunst frames the negativity of Jameson’s postmodern period
“against a background of conservative reaction under Ronald Reagan
in the United States” [22, p. 108]. In the fifteen years following Post-
modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson would
produce only four essays on science fiction and another singular article on
Raymond Chandler. In the essays, Jameson notably marginalises notions
of the utopian—despite the progression of ideas suggested by “Progress
or Utopia”. For example, in “Science Fiction as a Spatial Genre—Generic
Discontinuities and the Problem of Figuration in Vonda McIntyre’s The
Exile Waiting ” (1987), Jameson claims that the “shallowness” found
in contemporary utopias “is not a mark of their failure of imagination,
but rather very precisely their political function on the formal level—
namely, to bring the reader up short against the atrophy of the utopian
imagination and of the political vision in our own society” [4, p. 308].
While Jameson’s basic notions surrounding utopian fiction and desire
do not alter dramatically here, they express a more limited sense of
potential. Intriguingly, in two of these articles—“Science-Fiction as a
Spatial Genre” and “The Space of Science Fiction: Narrative in A. E. Van
Vogt” (1989)—he also discusses science fiction’s relationship to notions
of space. Elsewhere he claims that, in postmodernity, “it is at least empir-

ically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural
languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by cate-
gories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism” [2, p. 16].
In these two essays on science fiction, however, Jameson is less concerned
with notions of postmodernity, but rather science fiction’s relationship
to other genres—such as realism, detective fiction or contemporary soap
operas. For example, in “Science Fiction as a Spatial Genre” he states:
There is … in my mind some question as to whether the SF novelist

can plan architectonic effects … in the way a conventional novelist—for
example, the Flaubert of Salammbô—can, building carefully to an experi-
ence of proportion and time carefully blocked out by number of pages,
by overexposure to sensory detail, and above all relying on a certain set
of univocal reading directions which seem to me inconsistent and even
incompatible with the play of generic discontinuities in SF. [4, p. 301]
When Jameson does consider the postmodern in this work, he diminishes

the importance of postmodern development to certain kinds of space,
particularly the room. In “The Space of Science Fiction”, he claims: “In
all the extraordinary wealth of architectural and formal innovation in what
is sometimes called postmodernism today, there is one basic form which
does not seem to have changed … no one has been able to invent a new
… form for what we will call the room. It is as though the room …
had persisted with very little modification from prehistoric times” [320–
321]. Throughout this period, Jameson works to limit science fiction’s
engagement with the postmodern. Despite reducing the genre’s ability
to represent productive notions of utopia, he does not depict post-war
science fiction in the same restrictive terms as other postmodern cultural
material.
Within this period, Jameson also published “The Synoptic Chandler”
(1993). The essay again focuses on Chandler’s most famous detective
novels. In a similar manner to his contemporaneous work on science
fiction, Jameson limits the mapping capabilities of the detective in this
piece. He returns to notions of the room, in a discussion of the impor-
tance of the office to Chandler’s novels, claiming: “I am tempted to say
that in Chandler the office is—if not a well-nigh ontological category—
then at least one that subsumes a much wider variety of social activity
than it is normally understood to do” [23, p. 39]. Through a discussion
138 J. COGLE
of varying spaces in Chandler, Jameson claims that notions of the office

“problematize the commonsensical or ‘natural’ conception of dwelling
as such in Chandler; one of its advantages is the way it allows us … to
transform our first sub-form—the ‘dwellings’ of the rich … into spaces of
retreat and withdrawal that are somehow more analogous to offices than
to houses or even quarters or apartments” [23, p. 41]. The discussion
then moves onto the nature of Chandler’s strategies of containment. For
Jameson, “there can be no question that this particular ‘map’ of the social
totality is a complete and closed semiotic system: unified by the category
of the ‘office’, its various positions and inversions are able in a satisfac-
tory … manner to span the breadth of the social system from wealth to
poverty and … from public to private” [23, pp. 44–45]. Curiously, in a
fashion that rarely occurs across Jameson’s work, this discussion seldom
seeks to discuss how historical contexts influence these matters of form. In
the essay’s introduction, Jameson claims that the limits and repetitions of
Chandler’s fiction are not a result of his lack of imagination, “rather that it
was his society that lacked imagination and that such undoubted limits are
those of the narrativity of Chandler’s socio-historical raw material” [23,
p. 34]. The portrayal of Chandler’s novels that follows only concentrates
on the limits of their mapping operations, however, and Jameson restricts
their overall capabilities. He depicts the formal strategies of the text as
a “cognitive map of Los Angeles that Marlow can be seen to canvas,
pushing the doorbells of so many social types, from the great mansions
to the junk filled rooms on Bunker Hill or West 54th Place” [23, p. 53].
In contrast with “On Raymond Chandler”, the essay does not argue for
the political importance of this operation.
With the publication of Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Jameson
returned to working on genre fiction in earnest, and his discussions once
again align with his earlier material. We can read his interest in science
fiction, along with the way in which he allows it to function conceptually,
within the narrative of fluctuating optimism that Dunst denotes when
he frames “Jameson’s late work as the cautious opening of the present
to the past and the future” [22, p. 117]. In this regard, the lack of
material on science fiction during the 1980s and 1990s fits in with his
pessimism surrounding notions of political engagement at the time. In
Archaeologies of the Future, however, two decades after Jameson’s first
work on the postmodern, science fiction is once again adept at theoret-
ical engagement and political imagination. In the text’s second section, he
republishes many of his early science fiction essays. The opening section,
however, is comprised of new material that builds on his earlier questions

of utopian imagination in relation to the science fiction form. In an early
chapter, he discusses Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), noting the text’s
several strategies of containment: “In Utopia … the mark of … absolute
totalization is the geopolitical secession of the Utopian space itself from
the world of empirical or historical reality: the great trench which King
Utopus causes to be dug in order to ‘delink’ from the world” [4, p. 39].
Jameson continues this work across the new material in Archaeologies of
the Future, where he denotes the strategies through which utopian fiction
must imagine a radical break in order to represent an alternative future.
He outlines the difficulty for the late capitalist subject to conceive of a
society outside of the current situation, but also the manner in which the
representation of a radical break enables a new awareness of history and
the potential for dialectical thought. For Jameson, “the Utopian form
itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alter-
native is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts
this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more
traditional picture of what things would look like after the break” [4,
p. 232].
Throughout these discussions of generic fiction, Jameson delineates
formal boundaries that privilege specific examples of science fiction. In
certain ways, the preference for science fiction over high-postmodern liter-
ature appears to work against his highbrow interests elsewhere. In “The
Space of Science Fiction”, he claims:
I am very anxious that the texts I am going to be dealing with not be

simply assimilated to the paradigms of high culture.… They cannot be
read as Literature: not merely because they include much that is trash …
but above all, because their strongest effects are distinct from those of high
literature, are specific to the genre, and finally are enabled only by precisely
those sub-literary conventions of the genre which are unassimilable to high
culture. [4, p. 316]
His construction of the science fiction genre, however, once again

inscribes a sense of hierarchies within this generic field, ones invested in
the potential for Marxist analysis. For example, in a chapter of Archaeolo-
gies of the Future entitled “The Great Schism”, he delineates theoretical
differences that separate fantasy and science fiction, in a manner that
140 J. COGLE
moves beyond their basic generic conventions. He begins the discus-

sion by stating that the debate surrounding science fiction and fantasy
“has seemed to take on overtones of that bitter opposition between
high and mass culture crucial to the self-definition of high modernism
but far less significant in its postmodern avatar” [4, p. 57]. This claim
repeats his frequent appeal to move beyond “ethical” or value-based crit-
icism. Nevertheless, Jameson’s eventual elevation of science fiction above
fantasy continues to blend personal preference and Marxist ideology, in a
manner similar to his discussion of postmodern literature. For example,
he criticises the anti-historicist nature of the fantasy genre, particularly its
nostalgic return to battles of good versus evil:
The antagonistic religious ideologies of the Middle Ages are … combined

into a contemporary anti-Enlightenment spiritualism which speaks across
the spectrum to those dissatisfied with modernity.… It is also worth
mentioning the ahistorical nature of these ethical preoccupations, inasmuch
as it would seem to be the absence of any sense of history that most sharply
differentiates fantasy from Science Fiction. [4, p. 61]
Phillip E. Wegner has claimed that “The discussion of fantasy offered in

chapter 5 … is meant as much to highlight the shared aspects between the
two practices as to mark their formal differences.… Indeed, fantasy is now
to be understood as the practice that renders most evident the deepest
drive of all science fiction, that “of forming and satisfying the Utopian
wish” [24, p. 189]. Indeed, Jameson does attribute a utopian impulse to
varying aspects of contemporary postmodern production (Valences of the
Dialectic’s chapter on Wal-Mart is a particularly striking example). Never-
theless, it remains that he affords science fiction a number of conceptual
abilities, ones not found in his discussions of other post-war cultural
forms.
Within the same chapter of Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson
further differentiates certain types of science fiction from one other. In
a discussion of the contemporary domination of fantasy over science
fiction in terms of mainstream popularity, he makes the subtle distinction
between the conceptually engaged work of Arthur C. Clarke, Dick, Le
Guin, or Lem, and other types of science fiction. For example, Jameson
states, “not only do the sales of fantasy lists far outweigh those of a dimin-
ished ‘serious’ SF, but the latter now has a specialized following that can
scarcely be compared to the readership developed by Tolkien (posthu-

mously) or Harry Potter (very actual indeed)” [4, p. 57]. The quotation
marks denote another type of “non-serious” science fiction that Jameson
leaves undefined—although the space-opera genre is perhaps implied. He
further discusses the
unsolved generic problems inherent in distinguishing fantasy from SF, and

in particular in determining why any number of fantastic SF technologies,
such as teleportation or time travel … should be regarded any differently
from magicians and dragons. Darko Suvin’s influential conception of SF as
“cognitive estrangement,” which emphasizes the commitment of the text
to scientific reason, would seem to continue a long tradition of critical
emphasis on verisimilitude from Aristotle on. [4, p. 63]
While Jameson neglects to name particular examples of “non-serious”

science fiction, we might assume these texts contain a similar lack of
the social to that of fantasy, and that their generic traits are easily inter-
changeable. For example, he claims that novels such as Frank Herbert’s
Dune provide a developed sense of economics, and “reinforce compo-
nents of an essentially historical situation, rather than serving as vehicles
for the fantasies of power” [4, p. 59]. In contrast, Jameson claims that
fantasy breaks any sense of the economic or of class structure into a
system of “castes”, whereby each social group has its own differentiated,
autonomous culture that has little to do with the class systems in our own
world. Crucially, he distinguishes Le Guin’s fantasy novels from other
examples of the genre, whereby in works such as Always Coming Home,
“the paradigm of the struggle between Good and Evil becomes social-
ized and historicized by way of feminism” [4, p. 67]. Despite claiming
that Jameson’s engagement with fantasy does not “devalue” the genre,
Wegner cites from this same passage within Archaeologies of the Future,
including the following statement: “Magic [in Le Guin] may be read, not
as some facile plot device (which it no doubt becomes in the great bulk
of mediocre fantasy production) but rather as a figure for the enlarge-
ment of human powers and their passage to the limit” [4, p. 66].2 In
the text, Jameson goes on to claim that, through her interest in feminism
and the social, Le Guin “triumphantly demonstrates that fantasy can also
have critical and even demystificatory power” [4, p. 67]. In this manner,
fantasy acquires the heightened position of other generic fictions. It does
142 J. COGLE
so, however, through the privileged example of Le Guin—an author who

elsewhere writes “serious” and utopian science fiction.
Importantly, the grouping of “serious” science fiction writers, of which
Le Guin belongs to, do not ascend to the high-literary pretensions of
contemporary figures such as DeLillo or David Foster Wallace. These
writers commonly borrow from science fiction, however, a situation that
Jameson notes on occasion, but does not articulate in any sustained
sense. We can glimpse the critic’s complicated relationship to this sort
of generic boundary in a reading of the character Cayce Pollard from
William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Pollard works as a trend researcher
and, for Jameson, has “racked up some impressive achievements, of which
my favorite, reeking somewhat of DeLillo, is the identification of the first
person in the world to wear his baseball cap backwards” [4, p. 390].
The disjunction between the subjective “my favorite” and the more
negative “reeking”—coupled with Jameson’s ambivalent attitude towards
DeLillo—denotes a continuing ambiguity in Jameson’s work surrounding
the interaction between high literature and generic forms. We can further
determine his position in his summary attention to Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Jameson briefly mentions the text in paren-
theses in Postmodernism: “[The novel] has, for example, been assessed as
the first feminist dystopia and thereby the end of the very rich feminist
work in the Utopian genre as such” [2, p. 160]. In Archaeologies of the
Future, Jameson makes no mention of this novel, or Atwood at all for that
matter, and it is tempting to see this exclusion in terms of the text’s “lit-
erary” qualities. In the years after the publication of Archaeologies of the
Future, Jameson would make this type of discrimination more obvious,
in his review of Atwood’s later novel The Year of the Flood:
For the most part, dystopia has been a vehicle for political statements
of some kind: sermons against overpopulation, big corporations, totali-
tarianism.… Not coincidentally, it has also been the one science-fictional
sub-genre in which more purely “literary” writers have felt free to indulge:
Huxley, Orwell, even the Margaret Atwood of The Handmaid’s Tale. And
not unpredictably, the results of these efforts have been as amateurish as
analogous experiments in the realm of the detective or crime story (from
Dostoevsky to Nabokov, if you like).… So-called mass cultural genres, in
other words, have rules and standards as rigorous and professional as the
more noble forms.
But Atwood can now be considered to be a science-fiction writer, I’m
happy to say, and this is not meant to disparage. [25]
In this manner, Jameson briefly notes the tendency for contemporary

literary novels to integrate science fiction elements, although he has
not provided a sustained consideration of the limitations of this kind
of operation. Wallace’s Infinite Jest or DeLillo’s Cosmopolis are set in
future worlds, whether implicitly or explicitly. In contrast to the science
fiction Jameson prefers, however, the high-literary novels depict a future
situation only slightly more technologically advanced than our own. Post-
modern hyperreality also appears as only marginally more dystopian in
these texts. Jameson’s articles on postmodernism often perform a similar
operation, whereby the depictions of the postmodern sublime, the waning
of affect and the dissolution of boundaries between low and high art are
exaggerated descriptions of contemporary situations. In many ways, we
can align these essays with the work of DeLillo or Wallace. They derive
much of their energy from illustrating the more delirious aspects of the
postmodern condition, but also remain wary of these historical devel-
opments. These figures imagine the tendencies of postmodernity only
exacerbating, with little possibility for change.
Through these generic delineations, Jameson attributes to particular
types of science fiction the ability to represent history in a more satisfac-
tory manner. This propensity becomes more complex, however, in certain
chapters of Archaeologies of the Future. Occasionally, Jameson moves
beyond discussions of utopia and history, and sees certain science fiction
novels as formal exercises, ones that provide models for serious theoret-
ical exploration. For example, he sees Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris as a
“metaphysical parable of the epistemological relation of the human race
to its not-I in general: where that not-I is not merely nature, but another
living being” [4, pp. 108–109]. Jameson uses a variety of science fiction
texts that are not explicitly utopian to discuss other ideas in Archaeolo-
gies. In one instance, Blade Runner (1982) becomes a meditation “on
the ‘android cogito’, which is to say on the gap or flaw in the self as
such” [4, p. 141]. Jameson’s discussion of Solaris goes beyond this,
however, to suggest that the novel says something essential about our
current relationship to the other and its possibilities. The moment, once
again, sees Jameson’s theory diminish the importance of identity politics
and the subaltern. Despite his claim to consider the not-I in terms of
a living being, rather than an unknowable sense of nature, his engage-
ment with the other relies on notions of the Lacanian real, and thus
remains a concept predominantly outside of certain cultural understand-
ings. Jameson does not acknowledge another, more prevalent usage of the
144 J. COGLE
term found in postcolonial studies. Instead, the faulty way in which char-
acters in Solaris (along with readers of the novel) try to use human logic
and reason to interpret a sentient being’s action is, for Jameson, a strong
rendering of the problem of the alien and limits of human knowledge:
Lem’s ultimate message here [is] namely that in imagining ourselves

to be attempting contact with the radically Other, we are in reality
merely looking in a mirror and “searching for an ideal image of our
own world.” This is why there is a way in which the operation is not
merely self-defeating but even suicidal, for in order to strip away the
anthropomorphism, we must somehow do away with ourselves. [4, p. 111]
Jameson sees other works, such as Alien, The Man Who Fell to Earth and
Roadside Picnic, as offering similar considerations of varying problems
of unknowability. In this manner, he presents the hypothetical scenarios
and outcomes of science fiction as something like critical investigations,
without reminding the reader that the novels build these narratives from
certain formal conceits.
At the same time, Jameson is unable to strategise any further from this
point. Despite his renewed sense of optimism, he must close his argu-
ment by admitting that this work is “a rattling of the bars and an intense
spiritual concentration and preparation for another stage that has not yet
arrived” [4, p. 233]. As the new material in Archaeologies of the Future
reaches its conclusion, it seems as if Jameson’s work on science fiction has
traced its own limitations. The notion of utopia provides an avenue for
Jameson to discuss the potential for historical change in a period where
it seems largely impossible. Despite his “cautious opening of the present
to the past and the future” in this material, he only arrives at a series
of impasses. Notwithstanding the careful work he performs to articulate
the conceptual valences of science fiction—above postmodern literature in
particular—and the edges of utopian desire, he is unable to bridge certain
gaps. The relationship between the high-literary postmodern novel and
science fiction in Jameson thus becomes an extreme demonstration of
how textual preferences encroach on his theoretical frameworks. While
his readings of science fiction articulate a component of late capitalist
experience, and potentially allow for a broadened view of history and our
contemporary situation, these discussions circle a similar set of perceptual
limitations to the ones he attributes to Doctorow and others. This might
not be a problem of Jameson’s theoretical strategies, however, but of
historical perspective. In the years following Archaeologies of the Future,

his work has begun to discuss utopia in a different manner, and while
the concept remains important to his work, it no longer dominates his
portrayals of the future. For example, in texts such as The Antinomies
of Realism and The Ancients and the Postmoderns , Jameson has further
incorporated notions of collectivity and the global into his interpretive
practice. At the same time, this more recent work hints at the further
dissolution of specific genres. While he has often noted the breakdown
of borders between high and low literatures, his classificatory operations
have commonly worked to reinstate these kinds of boundaries. In the last
decade, however, this tendency has diminished. As Jameson claims in his
review of The Year of the Flood, “in any case it might be argued (but not
here) that at this moment of time, all fiction approaches science fiction,
as the future, the various futures, begin to dissolve into ever more porous
actuality: and the end of the world seems to approach more rapidly than
the unified world market itself” [25]. It would seem that the trend has
continued to emerge in recent years, and presents itself as a dominant
component of his newer theoretical discussions. In this manner, Jameson’s
work has begun to envision the future through a different approach.
Jameson and Contemporary Cultural

Material: Textual Peripheries,
Cognitive Maps and the Collective
In the final chapter of The Antinomies of Realism, entitled “The Histor-
ical Novel Today, or, Is It Still Possible”, Jameson begins his discussion by
differentiating a number of recent, popular kinds of historical fiction. He
claims, “the historical novel seems doomed to make arbitrary selections
from the great menu of the past, so many differing and colorful segments
or periods catering to historicist taste.… In short we have to do here, as
with realism, with an impossible form or genre that … is still assiduously
practiced” [5, p. 260]. Throughout the opening sections of the essay,
Jameson enumerates the difficulties of representing the past and charts
the historical novel’s formal modifications, considering Sir Walter Scott,
Balzac, Tolstoy and Joyce’s Ulysses . In this regard, the chapter discusses
many of Jameson’s recurring ideas and literary figures. His analysis of
the historical novel will take a different turn, however, when he focuses
146 J. COGLE
on the present, and on texts that are not traditional historical novels—
particularly David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and Christopher Nolan’s
Inception (2010). Through this process, Jameson begins to dissolve many
of the generic boundaries that have marked his earlier discussions. He sees
Inception as science fiction, with no qualifiers that remove it from the
novel form as such: “As so often in SF (in Necromancer, for example) the
plot is borrowed from another genre, in this case the heist or caper film”
[5, p. 299].3 In this manner, Jameson’s earlier sense that high literature
borrows from—or attempts to assimilate—generic fiction has become a
standard operation of the science fiction form. At the same time, he wishes
to read the film “less as a text than as a model and a kind of thought
experiment” [5, p. 298]. For Jameson, Inception uses the postmodern
perpetual present as a formal device and a significant element of the film’s
plot. The manner in which the film depicts dream worlds as objective
and material realities “advances cinema itself to the degree to which it
absolutely repudiates the … older [cinematic] conventions of subjectivity.
These are neither dream-sequences of the traditional kind, nor halluci-
nations, nor even flash-backs” [5, p. 299]. Jameson then claims, “the
contemporaneity of Inception (its postmodernity rather than its postmod-
ernism) is to be found in this aesthetic of an absolute present” [5, p. 300].
The film’s levels of dreams within dreams—each operating on an expo-
nentially slower temporal level than the last—become a representation of
this postmodern situation. The elevator that the film’s protagonist uses
to move between differing moments of his past provides Jameson with
a model for the contemporary historical novel—one that considers the
past, present and future simultaneously, and offers strategies for consid-
ering historical collectivity. This model is replicated, for Jameson, in the
formal invention of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas .
For Jameson, this novel is highly postmodern in its use of several
discursive strategies and its formal invention. As he notes, however, the
novel practices “an aesthetic of singularity, in which what is constructed
is not meant to be the elaboration of a style or the practice of a genre
… but rather the experimental projection of a single one-time conceit
inimitable and without a legacy or any intention of founding a tradition
formal or otherwise: not a new style, but the assemblage of various styles”
[5, p. 304]. Throughout the chapter, Jameson enumerates the multiple
ways in which Cloud Atlas invokes larger notions of history. The text
moves through a number of historical periods, including two futures—
firstly a technological dystopia, followed by a post-apocalyptic world. The
novel also depicts a series of communicative technologies, providing a

history of language and discourse in the process. Jameson discusses the
dialectical relationship of freedom and emancipation that shapes the text’s
form, as the first half of the book traces a “history of imprisonments: the
enslavement of the Moriori, the confinement of Ewing to his exiguous
cabin, the penniless destitution of the young composer, the surveillance
of the atomic energy site”, and others [5, p. 311]. The novel’s second
half, however, resolves these situations and, for Jameson, the “glissando
through all the styles and affects of history, whose unremitting greed it
handles with comic precision, leaves behind it the taste of that immemo-
rial cruelty which is human history itself and which Hegel could only
think of as one endless slaughterhouse. The joyousness of this art … is
scarcely contradicted by our other sense of prolonged horror” [5, p. 312].
For Jameson, the various discursive strategies, historical perspectives and
portrayals of social formation serve as a reminder of the heterogeneity of
human impulses, and here he makes a larger claim about the purpose of
art in our current historical situation:
The aestheticians return again and again to the problem of the extra-artistic
and referential dimensions of art, in its shabby ideological messages and its
altogether insufficient and rather pitiful calls to this or that action, this or
that indignation or “call to arms” … this or that coming to consciousness.
But the moment of the aesthetic is not that call but rather its reminder that
all those impulses exist: the revolutionary Utopian, one full as much as the
immense disgust with human evil, Brecht’s “temptation of the good,” the
will to escape and to be free, the delight in craftsmanship and production,
the implacably satiric, unremittingly skeptical gaze. Art has no function but
to reawaken all these differences at once in an ephemeral instant; and the
historical novel no function save to resurrect for one more brief moment
their multitudinous coexistence in History itself. [5, pp. 312–313]
In this manner, Jameson finds a text that provides the cognitive mapping
operation that he describes in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism, as well as the interpretation of Marx that he foregrounds
in the same essay, whereby “Marx powerfully urges us to do the impos-
sible, namely, to think [of capitalism] positively and negatively all at once”
[2, p. 47]. While Jameson’s more pessimistic depictions of postmodernity
often refrained from emphasising the positive aspects of late capitalism,
this reading of Cloud Atlas provides a potent example of a wider view of
history. At the same time, in seeing the positive and negative aspects of
148 J. COGLE
historical development, he perhaps moves beyond criticisms of nostalgia

and offers the potential to discuss a contemporary sense of modes of
production in a more dialectical fashion.
Jameson similarly expands his sense of cognitive mapping in another
example of more recent cultural material. His article “Realism and Utopia
in The Wire”—published five years after Archaeologies and reprinted in
The Ancients and the Postmoderns (2015)—comprises elements of his
theory relating to realism, film, television, detective fiction, cognitive
mapping and Utopian thought. Once again, Jameson works to dissolve
the literary and cinematic or televisual, when he asks, “Is The Wire a
police procedural … ? No doubt, but it is also a version of the organized
crime story.… There is a political drama going on here as well, but its
nature as local politics reminds us that it is also very much a local series.…
The broadest categories would then be that of the thriller or that of the
action film” [26, p. 239]. Jameson then goes on to conflate the series
with the classical epic and the Dickensian serial. Despite these generic
discontinuities, The Wire provides several important cognitive mapping
operations. We can relate these qualities of the text to the capacities
that Jameson attributes to realist and detective novels. Nevertheless, this
delineation of generic boundaries and formal capabilities seems finally to
disappear in this material. Up until recently, Jameson has warily differen-
tiated the science fiction novel from high-postmodern literature, despite
their various relationships. In the years following Archaeologies of the
Future, however, these boundaries become of less importance. These
texts are not decisively high literature, in the manner that the novels of
Pynchon or David Foster Wallace predominantly are. Cloud Atlas and
The Wire incorporate basic generic components with certain middlebrow
notions of “prestige”, but function predominantly as composites. In his
newer essays, Jameson’s classificatory operations remain as guidelines for
discussing the texts, but do not serve to restrict their abilities in the same
manner.
Additionally, just as the borders between cultural forms and genres
are beginning to dissolve in Jameson’s work, the possibilities for future
utopian desire and for conceiving new kinds of subjectivity and collec-
tivity are also becoming apparent. Jameson sees the police procedural as
charting a series of institutions, both legal and illegal, in a way that places
an importance on the ongoing web of connections, slowly pieced together
by the show’s detectives:
The uniform cops simply know the neighborhoods and the corners on
which the drugs are finally sold to customers by teams of juveniles.… But
this is as it were simply the appearance of the reality … whose ultimate
structure (source, refinement, transportation, sales network, and bulk or
wholesale distribution) must remain too abstract for any single observer to
experience, although it may be known and studied. [26, p. 242]
In this manner, Jameson’s reading of The Wire closely aligns with his
discussions of Chandler. The presence of utopian desire within the text,
however, builds on the detective novel’s political importance. The show
persistently represents the beginnings and failings of a variety of utopian
projects, whereby individuals attempt to restructure particular compo-
nents of the society that the series depicts. For Jameson, the case of
the dockworker Frank Sobotka, who attempts to reinvigorate Baltimore’s
port, “adds something to The Wire that cannot be found in most other
mass-cultural narratives: a plot in which utopian elements are introduced,
without fantasy of wish fulfillment, into the construction of the fictive,
yet utterly realistic events” [26, p. 253]. For Jameson, “the future and
future history have broken open both high and mass-cultural narratives
in the form of dystopian science fiction and future catastrophe. But in The
Wire, exceptionally, it is the utopian future which here and there breaks
through, before reality and the present again close it down” [26, p. 254].
This is one of the few moments in Jameson’s career where he reads the
utopian as present in the text, outside of science fiction.
Both of these aspects of The Wire, the cognitive map and the utopian
impulse, hint at another recurring aspect of Jameson’s discussions of the
future, that of the collective. Jameson sees Sobotka’s project as “not
an individual reform but rather a collective and historical reversal” [26,
p. 253]. Elsewhere, the criminal network represents “a whole milieu, the
world of a whole society or subsociety … but the ‘detective’ is also a
group” [26, p. 243]. In his earlier work on cognitive mapping, he has
seen new forms of collectivity as not yet existing, but waiting to be
theorised in further detail. As discussed in my chapter on realism, in
“Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?” Jameson discusses a
“fourth moment of theory” one not yet existing at the time of the essay’s
publication in 2004. In the essay he delineates this tendency in more
depth, stating:
150 J. COGLE
One wants to think of formulations (and indeed diagrams) for collectivities

that are at least as complex and stimulating as those of Lacan for the indi-
vidual unconscious. These structures have certainly been glimpsed in the
various explorations of the social or collective Imaginary in recent years.…
Subaltern studies … offers a variety of new ways to map a whole range
of collective phenomena. But it is in the nature of the beast (the human
animal) to drawback from such openings … and new theoretical fashions
like Giorgio Agamben’s idea of naked life are at once read as metaphysical
or existential statements or at worst enlisted to prove—being a kind of
zero degree—that the collective does not exist. [27, pp. 406–407]
Jameson also claims “it is not very satisfying to discuss fields that don’t
(yet) exist”; nevertheless, the term has also begun to proliferate in his
later work, offering a number of ways in which we might approach future
notions of the concept [27, p. 407]. In The Ancients and the Postmod-
erns in particular, he makes several references to differing notions of the
collective. Importantly, these discussions often arise in readings of partic-
ular cultural forms: for example, the films of Robert Altman and recent
literary production.
In his essay on Robert Altman, Jameson discusses the representation of
collective environments, but also the collaborative and collective nature
of the creative process of film. Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) provides a
differing example of the mapping procedure in The Wire. Jameson accen-
tuates the fact that the film is adapted from a selection of Raymond
Carver’s short stories, but notes the extent to which Altman “betrays”
Carver. Within this discussion, Jameson sees the film’s dissolution of
generic boundaries as aiding in the mapping operation: “A genre has rules
which must somehow be creatively navigated, and it is a historical forma-
tion which has its social preconditions. This is at least the perspective in
which I want to go on examining Short Cuts , as the emergence of totality
from the short story” [26, p. 214]. For Jameson:
each character is a bundle of … distinct narratives, and not some

unified identity.… It is a view consistent with the kind of contemporary
thought that evokes “multiple subject positions” and repudiates notions
of the centered self; and it makes … Altman’s representation of the city
… different from those earlier works which presented the latter as a
combination of coincidences that finally resolve themselves into a unified
picture.…
The distinction is subtle but significant … and the new genre that
instantiates it expresses a new historical experience of population … of
the multitude … of the phenomenonology of globalization.… This is more
than a casual experience of something unique and hitherto unencountered:
it amounts to an expansion of subjectivity itself and perhaps at the limit
a modification of its structure. We may indeed speak here of collectivity.
[26, pp. 217–218]
Here, one of Jameson’s characteristic detours represents an ellipsis in

his discussion. The collaborative nature of cinematic production offers
another kind of collectivity for Jameson to consider momentarily, before
he returns to a discussion of the function of the “roundabouts” of connec-
tivity to Short Cuts ’ narrative form. While he will further discuss a notion
of collectivity as “American misery”, these wider notions of genre, the
global and the collective remain only suggestive concepts in his more
recent work.
At the same time, these developments in Jameson’s theory have begun
to acquire several affinities with certain areas of postcolonial study—
ones concentrating on various notions of the cosmopolitan and peripheral
realisms in particular. As with the relationship between Jameson and
affect theory, however, the continuing distance between these scholars—
seemingly a prolongation of the fallout following the Jameson-Ahmad
debate—obscures the potential for productive engagement. For example,
a lineage of scholars considering the cosmopolitan has maintained a
cursory relationship with Jameson’s larger contributions to critical theory
over the last two decades. For theorists of the cosmopolitan working
in the late 1990s, Jameson’s material on the postmodern is occasion-
ally aligned with an idealism surrounding certain theories of globalism
or “postnationalism”, which is often contrasted with the continuing and
very material struggles of the developing world. In his introduction to
Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Pheng Cheah
claims that postnational theory is derived from “the modes of produc-
tion narrative that Fredric Jameson borrowed from Ernest Mandel” [28,
p. 32]. Cheah sees the postnational turn as arguing that “the deterritori-
alization of space in transnational … late capitalism erodes the naturalized
borders of the nation, pointing to its imminent demise” [28, p. 32]. Here,
Cheah aligns himself with Michael Mann’s claim that “capitalist profit
making has resulted in not quite Fredric Jameson’s ‘postmodern hyper-
space’” [29, p. 138]. Cheah is quick to remind the reader “even as the
152 J. COGLE
historic role of the nation-state as a framework for economic management

is eroded in the new phase of globalization, existing forms of social and
political power remain based in national realities” [28, pp. 34–35]. At a
certain level, Jameson’s sense of “hyperspace” has little to do with the
persistence of colonial discrepancies in wealth, power and cultural visi-
bility in the material world outside of the West. This reading, however,
excises significant elements of Jameson’s work on postmodernism: notions
such as “hyperspace” describe problematic aspects of Western cultural
material and of subjectivity in this material. They also constitute part of
what is a largely negative depiction of multinational capitalism, partic-
ularly when compared to the postnationalists whom Cheah references.
In this manner, Jameson’s more well-known phrases from his work on
postmodernism—such as “hyperspace”, “the waning of affect” or “the
hysterical sublime”—are commonly divorced from his Marxist readings
of the global.
Work on cosmopolitanism by critics such as Tom Lutz, Berthold
Schoene and Robert Spencer continues in this vein. While these scholars
reference Jameson’s numerous contributions to contemporary theory as a
matter of course, rarely do they consider his work at length. For example,
Lutz momentarily invokes Jameson when claiming that “instead of falling
for what Fredric Jameson called ‘the false problem of value’, critics are
now required either to disavow evaluative literary judgments or to cop
to their own place of elite privilege, their own exclusionary biases” [30,
p. 2]. Lutz moves on “to talk not just about regionalist fiction but about
what literature, the old-fashioned Literature with a capital ‘L’, has to offer
and has been offering for the last century and a half”, leaving Jameson’s
own complicated engagement with these issues unexplored [30, p. 3].
Spencer, meanwhile, considers Jameson’s discussion of cosmopolitanism
as a utopian project. Here, Spencer asserts that “Jameson’s calls for ‘the
renewal of Utopian thinking’ … can be heeded by a postcolonial criticism
prepared not just to demystify ideology … but also to amplify the ways
in which literary texts help construct new, more reflexive forms of subjec-
tivity in addition to more comprehensive forms of human community”
[31, p. 55]. Despite the suggestiveness of Spencer’s claim, his engagement
with Jameson here remains brief. As we can glimpse in this short passage,
however, a more complimentary relationship between Jameson and more
recent practices in postcolonial studies has begun to develop, even if it
is only occasionally acknowledged. This is evident in both postcolonial
works on the cosmopolitan as well as on “peripheral realisms”.
Scholarly production on the peripheral is comparable to the work on

cosmopolitanism discussed above, in that the two ambits are interested
in texts that are able to witness both subaltern and international reali-
ties. In this material, critics have sought to describe larger global contexts
for more localised narratives in a similar fashion. At the same time, the
more contemporary literary critics can also be loosely grouped with a
subset of the “new realist turn” that Jed Esty and Colleen Lye describe
in the “Peripheral Realisms” special issue of Modern Language Quarterly,
published in 2012. Esty and Lye discuss a particular strand of this turn
that takes place predominantly in postcolonial studies:
For the contributors devoted to recovering Georg Lukács’s theory of crit-

ical realism, Lukács is best appreciated for having located a text’s realism
in its aspiration to totality, with “totality” defined not as something out
there but as the demand to consider interrelations and interactions between
disparate phenomena. (Thus for Lukács naturalism fails to be a critical—
that is, a true—realism precisely insofar as it seeks a photographic record
of immediate reality rather than a depiction of historical forces in motion
or the dynamics of society.) [32, p. 277]
For Esty and Lye, the “Peripheral Realisms” issue is very much within
this return to Lukács. Susan Z. Andrade and Sharae Deckard, amongst
others, contribute in this fashion to the journal. This work has also
mirrored certain aspects of Jameson’s project, particularly in the reading
of certain contemporary novels as mapping operations. In this manner,
Esty and Lye argue for “the possible advantage of peripherality for
thinking relationally across different kinds of sub-ordinated positions on
different scales” [32, p. 272]. Sharae Deckard, for example, seeks to
see Roberto Bolaño’s depiction of Ciudad Juárez in 2666 as a cogni-
tive mapping project of not just the Mexican border city, but also of
wider global connections. For Deckard, the novel is an “insurgent attempt
to reformulate the realist world novel in order to overcome the reifi-
cation of earlier modes of realism.… The novel’s form is systemically
world-historical, uniting a particular semiperiphery (Ciudad Juárez) and
a particular historical conjuncture (late capitalism at the millennium) with
a vast geopolitical scope” [33, p. 353]. Meanwhile, even as Lukács does
not feature as a primary influence in the more explicitly cosmopolitan
theory of Lutz and Schoene, we can see similar types of readings in their
work, which often seeks to describe a larger global context for more
154 J. COGLE
localised narratives. For example, Schoene’s work on cosmopolitanism

asserts contemporary Britain’s “unique cultural and political position as a
post-imperial and increasingly devolved nation sandwiched between neo-
imperial US America and supranational ‘Old’ Europe. It is this in-between
position … that defines contemporary Britain’s specific globality: as part
of its imperial heritage, it is linked to over three quarters of the world”
[34, pp. 6–7]. These emergent reading practices have worked to expand
our sense of global interrelations, while making claims for the ability of
particular literatures to describe greater human collectivity.
A hesitance can be located here, however, between asserting larger
theoretical frameworks and maintaining a notion of heterogeneity and
dexterity. Work over the last decade that focuses on geocriticisms, literary
cartographies and the spatial turn, as represented by scholars such as
Bertrand Westphal and Robert T. Tally Jr., has emphasised the possibili-
ties of criticism that sees literature as a mapping process. In comparison,
cosmopolitan critics have often closely aligned with Bruce Robbins’ sense
that they “participate in and comment on the term’s scaling down, its
pluralizing and its particularizing” [35, p. 3]. Commonly their work
remains suggestive rather than systematic. Schoene’s The Cosmopolitan
Novel is representative of these tendencies, in that it constructs a case for
Britain’s tactical advantages when reading the global situation, but also
moves away from critical rigidity. In the text, Schoene claims, “there must
never be a school of cosmopolitan novelists lest the genre lose its conta-
gious momentum as both inspirational contact and process of inoperative
dissemination” [34, pp. 123–124]. Tally Jr. has considered this tension in
terms of the contributions of both Foucault and Jameson to these varying
areas of study and claims:
Maps are always and already bound up in those power/knowledge

networks which are the subject of Foucault’s genealogical studies, but (as
Foucault also insists) that does not mean that mapmaking is itself always
and only a repressive practice. The inability to map one’s position rela-
tive to a geography and social totality, as Jameson suggests, is perhaps the
emblematic form of modern or postmodern alienation. And though maps
function to enforce boundaries, to monitor movements, to aid the police,
to capture a given space, and so on, maps may also have liberatory uses.
The map of the prison, for instance, may be of help to one who wishes to
escape. [36, pp. 108–109]
In these wider discussions, the restrictive formal containment that defines

many of Jameson’s textual examples becomes crucial. For instance, while
his essay on The Wire develops the notion of cognitive mapping beyond
his hesitant early discussions, the focus remains predominantly on Western
cultural material. In contrast to the work on peripheral realisms or the
cosmopolitan, Jameson delineates his texts’ strategies of containment. In
the case of The Wire, he states, “Baltimore is a complete world in itself;
it is not a closed world but merely conveys the conviction that nothing
exists outside it.… Where the Greek gets his drugs is absolutely not
a matter of conjecture (or of subjective mapping)” [26, p. 250]. The
lasting distance practiced by Jameson towards postcolonial or periph-
eral literature after the reception of his “Third-World Literature” essay
makes itself apparent symptomatically: Jameson looks to cultural material
that performs elaborate mapping operations, but remains restricted by its
position within a North American context. At the same time, the atten-
tion he pays to the limits of his textual choices has its own value. Critics
working on the peripheral or cosmopolitan have remained less interested
in the formal containments of their chosen texts. Nevertheless, any larger
figural representation of global capitalism would benefit from a considera-
tion of the contours of these textual and perceptual boundaries. Similarly,
peripheral or cosmopolitan literature may offer a more dexterous position
from which to describe larger global connections, but the move towards
more cohesive maps of global capitalism inevitably requires a larger theo-
retical framework. The notion of cognitive mapping that Jameson has
tentatively discussed provides an overarching structure for divergent post-
colonial reading practices, while providing more room for heterogeneity
than earlier critics have suggested. For example, Jameson concludes The
Ancients and the Postmoderns by claiming:
There is one category [of literature] in which Americans have begun to

flag, and that is Faulknerian maximalism, whose interminable voices no
longer seem tolerable without their Southern framework. Now, translated
into something called “magic realism,” this American specialty … has been
promoted into a genuinely global genre, and we glimpse, outside the
confines of an American Program Era, the outlines of some wholly different
world system of letters coming into being. [26, p. 292]
While Jameson has often mentioned his interest in global literature, he

has rarely discussed these kinds of texts in detail. Whether his future work
156 J. COGLE
will further integrate notions of cognitive mapping, global literatures and

historical change remains to be seen. His later discussions of a variety of
cultural materials offer a multiplicity of reading strategies that hint in this
direction, however, even if certain incongruities will likely persist between
postcolonial studies and Jameson’s position within the United States. At
this stage, it would seem that even an antagonistic engagement between
Jameson and these scholarly ambits would be highly productive, especially
when compared to the prolonged distance currently in place.
Notes
1. The timing of this article’s production is of some significance here.
Although the essay was first published in Archaeologies of the Future,
Jameson assigns its production to the year 1982. As this date is right
around the period where Jameson starts to use the term “postmodern”
regularly, one wonders whether his notion of “modernist high literature”
might include writers such as Pynchon in this instance, given his earlier
senses of modernism. Note that Jameson does not use the term “high
modernist literature”, but rather “modernist high literature”.
2. For Wegner’s citation of this passage, see [24, p. 196].
3. Please note that the reference to Necromancer appears to be a typographical
error, given that William Gibson’s Neuromancer borrows narrative elements
from the heist genre.
References
1. Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since
1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
4. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and
Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005.
6. Jameson, Fredric. “On Raymond Chandler.” In The Critical Response to
Raymond Chandler, edited by J. Kenneth Van Dover, 65–87. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1995.
8. Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1990.
9. Hungerford, Amy. “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary.”

American Literary History 20, no. 1/2 (2008): 410–419. https://doi.org/
10.1093/alh/ajm044.
10. Parrish, Timothy. “Tribal Politics and the Postmodern Product.” American
Literary History 22, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 645–656. https://doi.org/10.1093/
alh/ajq036.
11. Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern,
1983–1998. London: Verso, 1998.
12. Jameson, Fredric. “The Aesthetics of Singularity.” New Left Review, no. 92
(March/April 2015): 101–132. Accessed May 23, 2020. https://newleftre
view.org/issues/II92/articles/fredric-jameson-the-aesthetics-of-singularity.
13. Shoop, Casey. “Thomas Pynchon, Postmodernism, and the Rise of the New
Right in California.” Contemporary Literature 53, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 51–
86. https://doi.org/10.1353/cli.2012.0001.
14. Grausam, Daniel. “History, Community, Spirituality: Keywords for
Rethinking Postmodernism?” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 2 (Summer
2010): 398–411. https://doi.org/10.1353/cli.2010.0008.
15. Levine, Paul. E. L. Doctorow. London: Methuen, 1985.
16. Morris, Christopher D. Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L.
Doctorow. Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 1991.
17. Parks, John G. E. L. Doctorow. New York: Continuum, 1991.
18. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New
19. Doctorow, E. L. The Book of Daniel. London: Macmillan, 1972.
20. McLaughlin, Robert L. “Post-Postmodern Discontent.” symploké 12, no.
1/2 (2004): 53–68. Accessed May 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/
40550666.
21. Duda, John. Review of Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia
and Other Science Fictions, by Fredric Jameson. MLN 120, no. 5 (December
2005): 1245–1249. Accessed May 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/
3840711.
3898/newf.65.07.2008.
23. Jameson, Fredric. “The Synoptic Chandler.” In Shades of Noir: A Reader,
edited by Joan Copjec, 33–56. London: Verso, 1993.
25. Jameson, Fredric. “Then You Are Them.” Review of The Year of the Flood,
by Margaret Atwood. London Review of Books 31, no. 17 (September 10,
2009). Accessed May 23, 2020. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/
n17/fredric-jameson/then-you-are-them.
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26. Jameson, Fredric. The Ancients and The Postmoderns: On the Historicity of
Forms. London: Verso, 2015.
27. Jameson, Fredric. “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?” Crit-
ical Enquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 403–408. https://doi.org/10.1086/
421141.
28. Cheah, Pheng. “Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitical Today.” In
Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited Pheng Cheah
and Bruce Robbins, 20–44. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1998.
29. Mann, Michael. “Nation-States in Europe and Other Continents: Diversi-
fying, Developing, Not Dying.” Daedalus 122, no. 3 (1993): 115–140.
Accessed May 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027185.
30. Lutz, Tom. Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.
31. Spencer, Robert. Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature.
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011,
1215/00267929-1631397.
33. Deckard, Sharae. “Peripheral Realism, Millennial Capitalism and Roberto
Bolaño’s 2666.” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 1 (September 2012):
351–372. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-1631433.
34. Schoene, Berthold. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-
sity Press, 2009.
35. Robbins, Bruce. “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.”
In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited Pheng
Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 1–19. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1998.
36. Tally Jr., Robert T. Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartog-
raphy in the American Baroque Writer. New York: Continuum, 2009.
CHAPTER 5
Conclusion: Fredric Jameson, the Novel

and Contemporary Reading Practices
In order to describe Jameson’s literary engagement, my work has relied

on retracing his development over the past half-century. In doing so, this
book has constructed a multitude of narratives within that time frame.
These narratives have often described fluctuations in Jameson’s theory:
this applies to his interest in specific kinds of novels, his use of certain
terminologies and his sense of optimism for the future. Frequently, the
changing landscape of critical theory and literary studies has served as a
backdrop to these modifications within Jameson’s work. While scholars
have predominantly defined his career in terms of three major texts—
Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism—the
sheer volume of his output ensures his work is often contradictory, and
more nuanced than critics sometimes acknowledge. Through examining
his treatment of specific literary periods, the changing and evolving nature
of his project is particularly evident. For example, over the course of his
career, Jameson’s modernist interests have become increasingly restricted
and highbrow. Conversely, his discussions of nineteenth-century texts
have become more inclusive and varied. These processes unfold over the
course of several decades, however, and several theoretical considerations
have influenced their development. In this manner, Jameson’s sense of
political possibility at certain moments of his career has seriously influ-
enced the manner in which he has discussed certain texts and genres.
Similarly, his ongoing reframing of late modernist criticism and Western
Marxist debates surrounding modernism underpin much of his work on

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54824-7_5
160 J. COGLE
high modernism—although this aspect of his project rarely becomes his

explicit focus. This more nuanced view of Jameson limits critics’ persis-
tent claims that his theoretical frameworks erase difference or totalise in a
problematic fashion.
More recent interpretive practices have also commonly portrayed
Jameson’s interpretive model as focused entirely on latent economic
symptoms found in cultural forms. These engagements present Jameson’s
texts as paradigmatic examples of specific critical practices, now frozen in
time. Nevertheless, Jameson has continued to reframe the ideas found in
these works. For instance, his notion of postmodernity has altered consid-
erably since the publication of “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism”. While the essay remains widely taught and discussed,
Jameson’s work has moved forward substantially. In the book length
project of the same name, he republished the essay “without significant
modifications, since the attention it received at the time (1984) lends it
the additional interest of a historical document”, already signifying his
distance from the work [1, p. xv]. Jameson continued to publish a wide
range of material on postmodernity throughout the following decade and
into the next century, and he regularly made subtle alterations to his
earlier formulations. As Alexander Dunst notes:
These new conceptualisations are never explicitly theorised or summarised,

never expressed in a statement of the magnitude of the earlier writings.
Rather, they are fragmentary and brief: single sentences and sub-clauses,
shifts in emphasis and terminology. What these adjustments introduce
are in most cases not outright reversals but integrations of the new
and re-interpretations of the old. Nevertheless they significantly open
Jameson’s critical project to heterogeneity, dynamic change and dialectical
contradiction in ways often absent from his thinking in the 1980s. [2,
p. 112]
In this regard, closely attending to the literary readings within Jameson’s

body of work reveals this aspect of his career in obvious terms. For
example, through mapping the progression of his work on science fiction
and contemporary fiction, we are able to come to more nuanced under-
standing of his portrayal of postmodernity, one that develops across
several decades, and one that moves beyond a problematic notion of a
perpetual present.
5 CONCLUSION: FREDRIC JAMESON, THE NOVEL … 161
Furthermore, criticisms of Jameson’s work—whether of his interpretive

models or of his problematic aspirations to totality—rarely acknowledge
that his arguments are in a similar kind of flux throughout his texts.
He tempers most of his prescriptive statements with carefully consid-
ered explications, clauses and deferrals. For example, he does not tell us
to “Always historicize!” without adding an ironic exclamation mark, or
without admitting that the imperative is indeed only a “slogan” in his
next sentence. The paragraph that follows this famous statement is also
a complicated discussion of the many possibilities of the “historicizing
operation”. Quite obviously, this minute phrase is the first two words of a
difficult and extremely self-reflexive text, but this has not dissuaded many
critics from equating Jameson’s work with this singular declaration. His
dialectical approach ensures his work is in perpetual motion—and often
subtly ironic—but this is perhaps not so obvious in the more dour early
work. These aspects of his writing are especially easy to remove when
lifting brief quotes from his relentlessly detailed sentences and paragraphs.
In considering his often evolving, sometimes contradictory approach to
novels—rather than focusing heavily on the systematic nature of some of
his thought and work—this facet of Jameson comes to the surface. As he
mentions in the introduction to the updated edition of The Ideologies of
Theory, which collects essays from over forty years of his career, “inasmuch
as ideological analysis is so frequently associated with querulous and irri-
table negativism, it may be appropriate to stress the interest and delight all
these topics, dilemmas and contradictions as well as jests and positions—
still have for me” [3, p. xi]. His engagement with the literary accentuates
this, where his frequent “jests” about certain authors and texts work
against the more programmatic claims he makes elsewhere. His repeated
discussions of Balzac’s tedious opening chapters, or his bemused engage-
ments with Nabokov’s novels, accentuate this component of his writing.
This aspect of Jameson’s material has increased, particularly in the last
decade. In the opening paragraph of The Ancients and the Postmoderns
(2015), for example, he claims, “I will myself begin (as one must) with
an outrageous assertion, namely that modernity begins with the Council
of Trent (ending in 1953)—in which case the Baroque becomes the first
secular age” [4, p. 1]. In the passage that follows, Jameson will argue
this notion in a more serious manner. The opening statement’s qualifying
terms, however, reveal the extent to which he plays with historical narra-
tive and with theoretical discourse, or the extent to which history remains
a pliable material for Jameson.
162 J. COGLE
Criticism has often focused on these kinds of larger periodising oper-

ations, accusing Jameson of erasing difference in particular. As discussed
across the book, this periodising operation is one that pays more attention
to complexity than critics usually acknowledge. The models that Jameson
borrows from both Raymond Williams and Ernest Mandel see history not
as a series of discrete periods, but a far more contradictory and contested
process of development. In many instances, nevertheless, critics portray
Jameson’s periodising operations as totalising procedures, ones that erase
difference and heterogeneity. As he notes in relation to his discussions of
postmodernity, however:
I must now briefly address [an] objection to periodization, a concern about

its possible obliteration of heterogeneity, one most expressed by the Left….
I am very far from feeling that all cultural production today is “post-
modern” in the broad sense I will be conferring on this term. The
postmodern is, however, the force field in which very different kinds of
cultural impulses—what Raymond Williams has usefully termed “residual”
and “emergent” forms of cultural production—must make their way. If we
do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back
into history as sheer heterogeneity … a coexistence of a host of distinct
forces whose effectivity is undecidable. [1, p. 6]
This is especially evident in his readings of literature. For example,

the cultural material of high modernity takes on several valences and
continues to shift and fluctuate throughout his career. Through closely
reading his hesitancies concerning high-modernist literature, this book
has also demonstrated a more complex characteristic of Jameson’s
periodising operations, and helped to delineate a period that Martin
Donougho calls “the absent center of his work” [5, p. 81]. In regard
to the nineteenth century, Jameson’s sense of mediation between realist
texts and capitalist development has occasionally lacked the fluidity of the
historical model he constructs in The Political Unconscious . Later work,
however, has accentuated a more complex and developed notion of this
period and its literature. In this regard, while Jameson’s more singular,
totalising narrative concerns the inexorable spread of global capitalism
across the last three centuries, the development remains contested in his
readings of literary materials. For Jameson, realism attempts to properly
map a rapidly splintering cultural, economic and geographical terrain—an
operation that persists in certain literary examples through to the twenty-
first century. High modernism, meanwhile, attempts to deny or subvert
this historical development, at the same time as providing a different

kind of map, one that charts complex subjective experience. As Jameson
has discussed: “in the late nineteenth century, writers became aware that
the world of newly emergent capitalism was an unrepresentable totality
which it was nonetheless their duty and vocation to represent. The great
moderns—Mallarmé, Joyce, Musil et al.—achieved this impossible and
double-binding imperative by representing their inability to represent”
[6]. If these varying representational strategies remain contingent and
largely without impact should perhaps not be a criticism of Jameson—as
Terry Eagleton has claimed—but a testament to the decreasing possibility
for cultural material to alter the current mode of production. Despite
these challenges, Jameson’s work continues to search for new interpretive
strategies. The combined notions of cognitive mapping and the collec-
tive, as well as a widening historical perspective, have lately provided a
new vigour to his discussions of cultural forms, and offer new political
possibilities for cultural material.
While these new directions in Jameson’s work represent an intriguing
renewal of his continuing preoccupations, his engagement with the novel
also accentuates persistent problems in his construction of a variety of
literary canons. This is especially evident in the genres and authors he
continues not to discuss. In The Ancients and the Postmoderns , he claims
that Marc McGurl’s work in The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and
the Rise of Creative Writing, which considers three strands of post-war
fiction, “quickly translates back into a canon and questions of value;
and at this point, quite apart from the absence of the poets, sets off
all kinds of idiotic questions about inclusion, principally the one I have
asked throughout: where is Faulkner?” [4, p. 291]. Jameson has else-
where expressed a lack of interest in critics that question his textual
omissions, even as he admits to asking a similar one of McGurl here.1
As he has discussed: “I am willing to identify in an imaginary way with
any number of foreign ‘national literatures’ as come my way, but it
is no doubt a fickle and transitory identification; I’m very unreliable,
and also, owing to the language matter, fairly Eurocentric (but very
much including Latin America)” [7, p. 1087]. While we cannot expect
Jameson to discuss all texts, and has often provided reasons for his partic-
ular enthusiasms and absences, the visibility of his work ensures that
these personal choices become canonising gestures. As he notes in the
introduction to The Modernist Papers , his chosen “literary texts might
also be taken to form some sort of personal canon, if not indeed a
164 J. COGLE
constellation of more universal validity” [8, p. ix]. While he consistently

diminishes the importance of his literary choices, this claim gestures to
its wider implications. For instance, his more prolific and sympathetic
commentators often discuss the breadth of his knowledge and cultural
engagement; they accentuate this component of his work amidst a more
general understanding of his career and importance.
In this regard, while Jameson’s frame of reference remains wide by
most standards, we can certainly question the extent of his “inclusivity”.
Scholars working in gender studies and postcolonial studies in partic-
ular have commonly criticised varying aspects of Jameson’s work. For
example, Sianne Ngai accentuates the male tradition of paranoid or “con-
spiracy” theory, whereby “conspiracy theory seems intimately tied to
the hermeneutic quests of male agent-intellectuals from Critical Inquiry
to Fox Television” [9, p. 300]. For Ngai, Jameson reads conspiracy
films in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, “as allegories for the attempt—and
more significantly, failure—on the part of subjects to grasp global capi-
talism’s social totality in formal or representational terms” [9, p. 298].
This gendered critical operation could also be marked in other cultural
terms: the examples Ngai raises in particular (of Jameson, Fox Mulder
from The X -Files and the heroes of films such as The Conversation and
All the President’s Men) are all thoroughly Western figures. These criti-
cisms are accentuated when closely considering his literary interests, where
female writers are persistently marginalised in his personal canon, and his
interest in more peripheral literature remains only modestly discussed.
Categories such as the domestic novel remain largely absent from his
work, despite an interest in private space. Furthermore, Flaubert stands
as his predominant example within discussions of domestic space and the
role of women in nineteenth-century fiction. In this manner, Jameson
has persistently avoided discussing personal politics of identity: notions of
race are conspicuously absent in his engagements with the colonial, and
he quickly folds any acknowledgements of feminism into wider notions
of class. Here, the primacy of Marxist frameworks in Jameson effec-
tively denies politics of identity. This insistence increasingly sees his work
askance with several developments within literary theory—particularly
affect theory or work that seeks to consider the subaltern. His focus on
the “impersonality” of consciousness in The Antinomies of Realism is a
more recent example of this tendency. This book has only briefly mapped
this tendency in Jameson—the chapter on post-war fiction did not discuss
his later engagements with figures such as Toni Morrison, for example.
Nevertheless, my work has sought to consider how these omissions in

Jameson’s purview, both in terms of theoretical and reading practice, offer
the opportunity for scholarship that integrates elements of his criticism
with recent developments in interpretive production.
Jameson’s textual interests often restrict the implementation of his
theoretical work in other ways. Jameson often delineates generic bound-
aries and specifies certain authors as paradigmatic examples of literary
forms and periods. Furthermore, he makes efforts to differentiate the
formal capacities of certain genres and classes of literature from each
other. This book has discussed ways in which these operations func-
tion as expressions of Jameson’s own taste, but also limit interpretive
options. For postmodern literature in particular, or the generic fiction
of the nineteenth century, this can have the effect of denying a text a
variety of political, historical and cultural valences. Perhaps most prob-
lematic for Jameson’s larger oeuvre is the sense that these matters of
taste directly impact on his portrayal of historical periods: the nineteenth
century is seen predominantly through the prism of high-realist French
literature, while postmodern literature’s limitations mirror criticisms of
the period as a whole. If his notion of historical change is more complex
than some critics admit, his conventional understanding of the canon
can circumscribe this complexity. When his engagement with a literary
form largely avoids this problem, as with high modernism, Jameson’s
discussion becomes ambiguous and shifting in an intriguing fashion. The
depiction of high modernism may remain less comprehensive within his
body of work, however, it also allows for a more heterogeneous sense of
the early twentieth century. Furthermore, in his later work on contem-
porary literature and film, these categories of genre and canon have
diminished somewhat. He continues to use notions of generic form as
guiding parameters, but the classificatory procedure loses much of its
weight. As “The Aesthetics of Singularity” suggests, Jameson’s views of
postmodern cultural material are in the process of changing, at the same
time as high and low cultural boundaries are in the process of disap-
pearing more completely. Although the early postmodern essays lament
certain aspects of high and low cultural forms in postmodernity, it would
seem that this particular dissolution has opened Jameson’s theory in a
number of directions. His work no longer aims to contain literary forms
that do not offer the kind of mapping qualities integral to his Marxist
project. Meanwhile, the genuine change in his readings of certain forms
of contemporary cultural material suggests that these forms have begun
166 J. COGLE
to alter in a significant manner, particularly in comparison with the texts

found in his early postmodern essays. Perhaps most intriguingly, this work
indicates that cultural forms have begun to shift drastically from the earlier
moment of postmodernity that his famous essays delineate. Whether this
signifies a larger structural shift in our current historical situation remains
to be seen.
As our sense of literary interpretation, historical development and
cultural theory continue to develop, this book has suggested ways in
which Jameson’s theoretical frameworks remain useful for scholarly work.
The focus on Jameson as a reader of literature has provided a new perspec-
tive for considering his career, one that sees his major contributions to
critical discourse as situated within a rich body of work that has consis-
tently progressed over the past several decades. My work has referred
to ongoing developments in scholarly production: surface reading, affect
theory, object and thing theory, alternate modernities, peripheral realisms,
work on the cosmopolitan, theories of the post-postmodern and contem-
porary postmodern literary criticism. Nearly all of this work relies on
literature as its primary interpretive focus, even as it theorises variant
aspects of cultural experience. It is a testament to Jameson’s influence that
these often programmatic attempts to define a new interpretive method
must engage with his theory in some manner. Surface reading defines
Jameson’s symptomatic practice in specific terms, in order to move past
interpretive strategies that concentrate on the hidden depths of a text.
Contemporary work on the post-war novel seeks to widen our percep-
tion of the postmodern turn, often arguing against criticism that has
taken the more famous of Jameson’s pronouncements on postmodernity
as the guiding parameters for its practice. This book has often worked
to broaden a more general perception of Jameson’s theory through
performing close readings of his sense of genre, historical periods and
cultural possibility. If this work has achieved its intentions, it should now
seem that some of the oppositions suggested in both Jameson’s work and
the scholarly ambits that have defined themselves in relation to him are
often arbitrary, and that these reading practices have more in common
with Jameson than is typically recognised.
In this manner, while Jameson’s interaction with alternate modernities
or geomodernisms remains brief, his theory of the modern as discussed in
A Singular Modernity offers the opportunity for larger mapping proce-
dures. The text has been a source of some controversy for Jameson
and he has stated: “I’m sorry to say that after the publication of A
Singular Modernity, in which the very concept of ‘alternate moderni-

ties’ was dismissed, my Chinese and Brazilian readers seem to have parted
company with me, accusing me of being yet another Western or first world
theorist preaching to the rest of the world and seeking to impose Western
theories on it” [10, p. 7]. This book has traced moments where Jameson
implicitly or explicitly works from a thoroughly Western perspective. It
should be noted that his insistence on the ultimately determining factor
of modern history, that of Western capitalist development, allows for a
multitude of national situations, however much they remain tied to the
development of the empirical centre. With this in mind, work on alternate
modernities and Jameson’s work on modernism nevertheless have several
similar attributes. Both often see texts as mapping procedures, and, in
this regard, work on peripheral realism has similar affinities. Esty and Lye
have argued for a sense of realism in the peripheral against notions of the
modern:
the extension of modernist studies to a vast array of “late modernist”

cultural products, and indeed the rediscovery (by Anglo-American scholars)
of early modernisms in Mexico, China, and Persia, cannot fully shed the …
attachment to metropolitan avant-gardism. Nor can it account, we think,
for other genealogies of the global novel stretching across the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, such as the realist call to arms of Seán Ó Faoláin
in the wake of Joyce or Naguib Mahfouz’s insistence on the social novel
after the peak influence of Egyptian surrealism. [11, p. 275]
The extent to which so much of the scholarly material concentrates

on mapping procedures belies the degree to which they are seeking
similar ends: more complex and appropriate models for understanding the
complicated intersection between culture, history, economics, the subject
and the material. Each ambit concentrates on particular texts, or groups of
texts, and focuses on particular terminology, as it is useful. As Jameson’s
material on The Wire suggests, these cultural items remain confined by
structural limits. Meanwhile, as alternate modernities claim space for the
subaltern and the peripheral within a more traditional Western canon of
modernism, Western experiences of global capitalism are less discussed.
Why do reading practices in this vein not strive to see texts in relation
to each other, as overlapping mapping procedures? Jameson’s reading
of Ulysses sees the text as providing a unique model for mapping wider
aspects of imperialist capitalism, one that other national situations could
168 J. COGLE
not replicate. How his reading of Howards End from the same essay might
interact with the readings of Lu Xun and Ousmane Sembène remains to
be seen. Susan Stanford Friedman has argued for
a new kind of transnational approach … a reading strategy I call cultural

parataxis, by which I mean a juxtaposition of texts from different times and
places for the new light this geopolitical conjuncture spreads on each….
Cultural parataxis invites a new form of comparativism, one not based
solely on … tracing the itineraries of influence often from a presumed
Western center to non-Western peripheries. [12, p. 245]
The mapping of both connections and gaps both in and between texts
offers the potential for more dramatic and globally inclusive models of
literature. In this regard, the large body of work Jameson has produced
investigating notions of the cognitive map provide several well-developed
parameters from which to extend this notion of cultural parataxis. Here,
we might move beyond certain boundaries surrounding texts, their
authors, and the critics who discuss them.
My work has often traced the problems that arise as a result of
Jameson’s canonising gestures, or sought to consider how his comments
about taste can reconcile with his claims for critical distance when
considering cultural histories. These issues are a result of inevitable
idiosyncrasies, ones that will arise in any singular body of work. Jameson’s
ironic and nimble engagement with this aspect of his oeuvre often seeks
to admit as such. These criticisms of his theoretical and literary work are
not then in the service of painting him personally as culturally imperialist.
Instead, this book has sought to consider how his work might interact
with other interpretive perspectives, or how it might apply to literatures
outside of his purview. At the same time, my work has aimed to broaden
a more general perception of Jameson. His career is often defined in
terms of his most famous work, and certain criticisms of his theory have
persisted from the 1980s onwards. My work has aimed to delineate to the
careful, contextual and contingent manner in which he makes his larger
claims, as well as to the way in which his oeuvre, for all its moments of
uniformity, remains in a constant state of flux. Jameson’s thought aims
for larger and broader structures, but remains resolutely dialectical: it
shifts in its constant negotiation of contradiction and possibility. If his
literary choices, and the way in which he delineates their Marxist interest,
remain restricted in certain ways, this book asserts that—even as we might
disagree with certain aspects of his work—his body of criticism is not

the rigid and remote structure that it occasionally appears to be. As we
continue to place Jameson within certain frameworks—Marxism, post-
modernism, symptomatic reading, to name a few—we should seek to
consider his larger career, but also how these frameworks will shape a later
sense of Jameson’s work. More immediately, if his theory is to remain
useful to contemporary scholarly production, we need to be more flexible
in our engagement with his work. In essays on the post-postmodern, the
impulse to work through Jameson’s canonical portrayals of the period
often limits the discussion in certain regards. Just as he has worked to
reframe Lukács throughout his career, the challenge for contemporary
critics is to rethink Jameson’s theory. For Jameson to remain useful, to
both literary criticism and cultural theory alike, we should define his
career not only by its most famous moments, but the lengthy articula-
tion of a wide subset of issues and ideas. Through paying attention to
Jameson’s literary criticism, and the reflexivity found there, we accentuate
the continued opportunity for this kind of engagement.
Note
1. One could certainly ask the same question of Jameson, who has often
spoken of Faulkner as a major formative influence, while never discussing
the author in detail.
References
3898/newf.65.07.2008.
4. Jameson, Fredric. The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of
Forms. London: Verso, 2015.
5. Donougho, Martin. “Postmodern Jameson.” In Postmod-
ernism/Jameson/Critique, edited by Douglas Kellner, 75–95. Washington,
6. Jameson, Fredric. “In Hyperspace.” Review of Time Travel: The Popular
Philosophy of Narrative, by David Wittenberg. London Review of Books 37,
170 J. COGLE
no. 17 (September 10, 2015). Accessed May 23, 2020. https://www.lrb.

co.uk/the-paper/v37/n17/fredric-jameson/in-hyperspace.
org/10.1017/S0021875814001376.
9. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005.
10. Jameson, Fredric. “Introduction: On Not Giving Interviews.” In Jameson
on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism, edited by Ian Buchanan,
1–10. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
1215/00267929-1631397.
12. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Paranoia, Pollution, and Sexuality: Affiliations
between E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Arundhati Roy’s The God
of Small Things.” In Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, edited by
Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, 245–261. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2005.
Index
A S/Z , 9
Adorno, Theodor, 6, 32, 33, 82, 94, Baudrillard, Jean, 13, 16
105, 108–110 Benjamin, Walter, 6, 108
affect, 19, 20, 24, 25, 27, 35, 36, 38, bildungsroman, 33, 48
42, 43, 54, 55, 64–75, 80, 129, Bloch, Ernst, 6, 7, 12, 90, 108
143, 147 Bolaño, Roberto, 153
Ahmad, Aijaz, 56, 86, 88, 89 2666, 153
alternate modernities, 26, 90, 95, 98, Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 55
102, 111, 166, 167 Brecht, Bertolt, 105, 108, 110, 147
American Graffiti, 124, 129 Brennan, Teresa, 66
Atwood, Margaret, 142 Brontë, Charlotte, 46, 48, 50, 55
The Handmaid’s Tale, 142 Brontë, Emily, 55
The Year of the Flood, 17, 142, 145 Wuthering Heights , 50, 59
Auerbach, Erich, 5 Buchanan, Ian, 2, 5, 17, 89, 104
Austen, Jane, 39, 48, 55, 56
Burroughs, William S., 92, 116, 122
Naked Lunch, 119
B
Balzac, Honoré de
La Comédie humaine, 41 C
La Cousine Bette, 8 capitalism, 12, 23, 24, 31, 32, 42,
La Rabouilleuse, 63 44, 58–60, 62, 63, 72, 73, 84,
Barry Lyndon, 136 85, 87, 88, 90, 96, 97, 99, 101,
Barthes, Roland 105, 109, 136, 147, 152, 155,
“L’effet de réel ”, 41, 67 162–164, 167
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 171
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54824-7
172 INDEX
Chandler, Raymond, 26, 132, 133, Dunst, Alexander, 17, 80, 86, 136,
137, 138, 149 138, 160
Cheah, Pheng, 151, 152
cognitive mapping, 20, 24, 84, 87,
90, 101–103, 117, 132, 134, E
147–149, 153, 155, 156, 163 Eagleton, Terry, 11, 12, 31, 32, 38,
collectivity, 27, 38, 62, 72, 73, 145, 51, 52, 93, 98, 163
146, 148, 149, 151, 154 Eliot, George, 36, 39, 46, 48, 51–53,
Conrad, Joseph, 2, 10, 24, 34, 57, 55, 66, 107
61–63, 79, 84, 98, 104, 106, Daniel Deronda, 53
125 Middlemarch, 52, 53
Lord Jim, 44, 62, 106 Romola, 53
cosmopolitan, 27, 151, 152, 154, Eliot, T.S., 86, 92, 98
155, 166 Esty, Jed, 18, 27, 153, 167
critical theory, 1, 2, 5, 8, 16–19, 22, everyday, 12, 35, 38, 51, 56, 67, 68,
27, 72, 129, 151, 159 70, 74, 75, 99
Expressionism, 108
D
F
Deckard, Sharae, 153 fantasy, 41, 51, 121, 128, 135,
Deleuze, Gilles, 9, 10, 59, 61, 75, 139–141, 149
129 Faulkner, William, 92, 95, 169
DeLillo, Don, 23, 26, 115, 117, 123, Flatley, Jonathan, 38, 66, 71–75
124, 142, 143 Flaubert, Gustave, 7, 23, 24, 32, 33,
Cosmopolis , 143 35, 37, 38, 40–42, 46–48, 56,
White Noise, 123, 131 59, 62, 67, 73, 76, 91, 164
detective fiction, 16, 20, 132, 133, Madame Bovary, 57
137, 148 Salammbô, 135, 137
Dickens, Charles, 33, 34, 37, 39, 41, “A Simple Soul”, 41, 42
44–48, 107 Ford, Henry, 96
Hard Times , 33, 45 Formalism, 16, 33
Dick, Philip K., 26, 132, 134, 135, Forster, E.M., 23, 98, 100, 102
140 Howards End, 93, 99, 168
Doctorow, E.L., 26, 116–118, Foucault, Michel, 10, 14, 125, 154
121–124, 127, 129, 131, 132, French Revolution, 63
144 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 102, 103,
The Book of Daniel , 118, 127, 129, 168
131
Ragtime, 96, 118, 123, 127–129
Donougho, Martin, 79, 162 G
Du Bois, W.E.B., 74 Galdós, Benito Pérez, 48, 66, 70
The Souls of Black Folk, 71 Gartman, David, 97, 98, 100, 110
INDEX 173
Gaskell, Elizabeth, 46, 55 75, 79, 81, 93, 95, 116, 132,
gender, 37, 55–58 145, 164
genre, 10, 16, 23, 24, 35, 37–39, Archaeologies of the Future, 26, 51,
48–50, 52, 54, 55, 58, 64, 65, 72, 116, 138–145, 148, 156
70, 121, 132–141, 145, 146, “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying
148, 151, 154, 156, 159, 163, the Ideology of Modernism”,
165, 166 72, 83, 91, 106
Gibson, William, 135 Fables of Aggression, 25, 80, 83, 92,
Neuromancer, 156 99, 109, 110
Pattern Recognition, 142
The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema
Gissing, George, 10, 34, 37, 46, 47,
and Space in the World System,
63
70, 116, 164
Grausam, Daniel, 2, 115, 127, 131
“Imaginary and Symbolic in La
Grossberg, Lawrence, 19, 68, 97
Rabouilleuse”, 40, 46
Gross, David S., 14, 15, 103
Marxism and Form: Twentieth-
Century Dialectical Theories of
H Literature, 1, 6–9, 11, 17, 32,
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 4, 5, 17 42–44, 83, 159
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 6, “Metacommentary”, 8, 9, 17, 103,
7, 11, 12, 17, 147 119
Hemingway, Ernest, 25, 33, 91, 92 The Modernist Papers , 16, 25, 80,
hermeneutics of suspicion, 19, 69, 70 93, 95, 163
Homer, Sean, 1, 2, 5, 16, 17, 60 “On Raymond Chandler”, 85, 96,
Horne, Haynes, 60, 81 119, 133, 136, 138
Hungerford, Amy, 2, 115, 117, 119, The Political Unconscious: Narrative
127, 131 as a Socially Symbolic Act , 1, 2,
Hutcheon, Linda, 115, 128 6, 8–12, 15, 19, 20, 24, 25,
31, 32, 34–40, 44, 46, 49–51,
57–61, 63, 64, 66, 69, 75, 79,
I 80, 83, 84, 98, 102, 104, 109,
imperialism, 26, 44, 86, 90, 95, 100 127, 159, 162
Inception, 146
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism, 1, 2,
J 6, 12, 13, 16, 20, 66, 69, 80,
James, Henry, 69, 94, 107 116, 119, 136, 147, 160
Jameson, Fredric The Prison-House of Language, 8,
The Ancients and the Postmoderns , 16, 17, 33, 34
145, 148, 150, 155, 161, 163 “The Realist Floor-Plan”, 40, 42,
The Antinomies of Realism, 20, 21, 44, 57, 59, 60, 67, 73, 75
25, 35–39, 43, 47, 48, 51–53, “Reflections on the Brecht-Lukács
55–57, 61, 63–67, 70, 71, 73, Debate”, 110
174 INDEX
“Reification and Utopia in Mass Tarr, 99

Culture”, 119, 121 Lukács, Georg, 3, 6, 7, 11, 24, 32,
Sartre: The Origins of a Style, 5, 81 33, 36, 37, 41–43, 49, 51, 52,
A Singular Modernity, 16, 25, 61, 58, 101, 105, 108–110, 169
80, 89, 94, 95, 98, 107, 116, The Historical Novel , 41, 135
166 History and Class Consciousness , 6,
“Symptoms of Theory, or Symptoms 101, 109
for Theory?”, 72 Lutz, Tom, 152, 153
“Third-World Literature in the Era Lu, Xun, 87, 168
of Multinational Capitalism”, Lye, Colleen, 18, 27, 153, 167
25, 56, 86 Lyotard, Jean-François, 13, 15, 16,
“Ulysses in History”, 80, 94, 104 60, 68, 115, 120
Jaws , 121, 122
Joyce, James, 23, 25, 82, 86, 92–94,
100, 102, 104, 117, 125, 163
Ulysses , 4, 35, 93–95, 100, 102, M
104–106, 145, 167 Mandel, Ernest, 97, 151, 162
Mann, Thomas, 43, 82, 94, 104, 105,
108
K Marcus, Sharon, 18, 19, 21
Kafka, Franz, 104, 105 Massumi, Brian, 19, 68
Kellner, Douglas, 1, 14, 16 McGurl, Mark, 115, 163
Kluge, Alexander, 118 melodrama, 36, 37, 43, 47, 51–54
Chronik der Gefuhle, 36 Mitchell, David, 116
Kraus, Chris, 131 Cloud Atlas , 116, 146–148
Munch, Edvard
“The Scream”, 68, 69
L
Lacan, Jacques, 13, 75, 129, 150
late capitalism, 15, 25, 26, 62, 66, 68,
73, 97, 115, 119, 121, 129, 135, N
147, 151, 153 Nabokov, Vladimir, 81, 92, 119, 142,
late modernism, 81, 89, 92, 93 161
Lazarus, Neil, 17, 18, 87 Lolita, 93
Le Guin, Ursula, 26, 57, 132, 134, national allegory, 87, 89, 99, 101
135, 140–142 naturalism, 34, 40, 42, 43, 47, 83,
Always Coming Home, 141 108, 153
Lem, Stanislaw, 26, 132, 135, 140 New Criticism, 5, 6, 9, 40, 64
Solaris , 143, 144 Ngai, Sianne, 19, 38, 55, 56, 66,
Levine, Paul, 127 70–75, 164
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 10, 33 nostalgia, 81, 96, 121, 129, 148
Lewis, Wyndham, 25, 82, 83, 98, 99, nostalgia film, 123–125, 132, 136
102 nouveau roman, 118, 119
INDEX 175
P Sembène, Ousmane, 87, 168

Parks, John G., 127 Shoop, Casey, 125–127, 129, 131,
Parrish, Timothy, 2, 15, 115, 119, 132
120, 127 Short Cuts , 150, 151
peripheral realisms, 27, 151, 152, Single White Female, 72, 74
155, 166, 167 Sōseki, Natsume, 86, 100
postcolonial studies, 2, 18, 27, 89, Spencer, Robert, 152
102, 117, 144, 151, 152, 156, Structuralism, 33
164 style indirect libre, 36, 42, 56
postnationalism, 151 subjectivity, 14, 19, 24, 38, 42, 59,
poststructuralism, 9, 14, 64, 110, 60, 64, 67, 69, 71, 75, 94, 129,
125, 127 131, 146, 148, 151, 152
Pound, Ezra, 86, 92, 95, 98 symptomatic reading, 18, 19, 27, 37,
Propp, Vladimir, 33, 45 64, 66, 69, 73, 129, 169
Proust, Marcel, 25, 82, 86, 92, 94,
100
Pynchon, Thomas, 23, 26, 115–119, T
121, 122, 124–126, 131, 132, Tally Jr, Robert T., 17, 20, 103, 154
148, 156 Terada, Rei, 21, 66
The Crying of Lot 49, 118, 124–127 Thackeray, William, 46
Tolstoy, Leo, 32, 33, 36, 39, 57, 62,
63, 70, 71, 73, 145
R totality, 3, 7, 9, 11, 14, 22, 38, 40,
reification, 10, 15, 24, 26, 35, 42, 60, 81, 87, 101, 138, 150, 153,
49, 58, 62–64, 67, 68, 72–75, 154, 161, 163, 164
82–86, 92, 105, 106, 109, 110,
117, 153
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 118, 119 U
romance, 24, 34, 37, 39, 48–51, 54, utopia, 57, 137, 143–145
55, 61
V
S van Gogh, Vincent, 2, 85, 119
Said, Edward, 12, 87, 93, 106 “A Pair of Boots”, 79, 85
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 4–6, 53
Schoene, Berthold, 152–154
science fiction, 16, 20, 23, 26, 35, 50, W
54, 57, 116, 131–146, 148, 149, Wallace, David Foster, 142, 143, 148
160 Infinite Jest , 118, 143
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 19, 21, 27, Warhol, Andy, 2, 85, 92, 116, 118,
55, 66, 69–71 123
Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, “Diamond Dust Shoes”, 69, 85,
Performativity, 69 119
176 INDEX
Watkins, Evan, 11, 17, 60 The English Novel from Dickens to

Watt, Ian, 36, 106 Lawrence, 44
The Rise of the Novel , 44 Wire, The, 17, 148–150, 155, 167
Wegner, Philip E., 79, 80, 83, 107, Woolf, Virginia, 50, 55, 93, 94, 100,
140, 141, 156 102, 111
Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, The To the Lighthouse, 93
University, and the Desire for The Voyage Out , 93
Narrative, 17
West, Cornel, 3
Western Marxism, 39, 109, 110 Z
Williams, Raymond, 10, 31, 44, 45, Zola, Émile, 24, 32, 35, 37, 40, 42,
109, 162 43, 47, 48, 59, 65, 70, 73, 125

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Jameson

ISBN 978-3-030-54823-0 ISBN 978-3-030-54824-7 (eBook)

Cover image: © CSA Images/Getty Images, Image ID: 152405256

1 Historical Contradictions: The Career, Critical

2 Jameson and Nineteenth-Century Realism: Generic

3 Jameson and the High-Modernist Novel: Absence,

4 Jameson and Post-war Literature: Postmodernism,

5 Conclusion: Fredric Jameson, the Novel

Historical Contradictions: The Career,

© The Author(s) 2020 1

impact of his work and contextualise his major theoretical interventions

Major Contributions: Marxism,

It was a time when—in the ‘50s—English departments were not reading

intellectual field of thought than literary specializations that focus mainly

Over the next decade, Jameson would be employed at two major

If … we set aside that part of Lukács’ work which constitutes a set of

Jameson finishes the book by touching on some of the major theoret-

political interpretation of literary texts” [16, p. 17]. He claims this inter-

false ideology, reification and modes of production within these varying

fashionable book.… Jameson boldly emerges as … a shamelessly unre-

Preserving the autonomy of [literary, political and economic] levels

This hesitancy towards Jameson’s interpretive frameworks is a common

tortuous, intractable materials” [18, pp. 14–15]. Similarly, in “Fredric

such as Jean Baudrillard, Jurgen Habermas, Ihab Hassan, Charles Jencks

constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds

In the essay, Jameson analyses a variety of cultural materials in terms

It is interesting here and elsewhere to observe the ways that Jameson’s

For example, in “Marxism and Resistance: Fredric Jameson and the

Language Association in 1991. The original “Postmodernism, or, the

Jameson’s Longue Durée: Minor

One (2011) would consider, respectively, of the history of dialectical

To this day, critiques of Jameson are overshadowed by his writings on

This tendency can be seen in monographs such as Sean Homer’s

time, The Political Unconscious was instrumental in the development of a

The influence of Jameson’s version of symptomatic reading can be felt in

In the context of recent U. S. critical theory … where Marx, Nietzsche and

Sedgwick also belonged to a group of affect theorists, including Lawrence

his previous discussions. We should note that Jameson’s impersonal style

I mean to endorse or to correct the philosophies of which it currently

books commenting on his career are sympathetic to their subject. Scep-

Reading Jameson Reading the Novel

manoeuvring between larger historical narratives and moments of speci-

modernisms, although he argues against notions of alternate modernities

work, which has begun to see more opportunity in contemporary fiction,

16. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic

31. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.”

Jameson and Nineteenth-Century Realism:

Realism, Marxism and the Canon

In The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson limits his political intent,

© The Author(s) 2020 31

proposed as the most urgent task of a Marxist cultural criticism” [6,

The novelists that commonly appear throughout The Prison-House

already been formulated for us by the author in terms of a binary opposi-

After publishing The Political Unconscious , Jameson focused heavily

concept of totality on poststructuralist terms, Jameson’s treatment of the

Jameson’s Nineteenth-Century Canon:

writers in closed realist terms, in a manner that contradicts his descrip-

This narrative will be repeated on a number of occasions, notably in