Description
By (author) Jameson, Fredric
Short /annotation:
The giant of literary theory analyzes the novel: Conrad, James, Atwood, Oe, Mailer, Grass, Grossman, Garcia Márquez, Gibson, Knausgaard and more
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A novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the naïve reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation and, in the best and most intense cases, to propose a wholly new idea of what constitutes an event or of the very experience of living. The most interesting contemporary novels are those which try-and sometimes manage-to awaken our sense of a collectivity behind individual experience, revealing a relationship between the isolated subjectivity and a class or community. But even if this happens (which is rare), one must go on to find traces of collective praxis hidden away within the awakened feeling of inter-connection. And since it is in the sense of the nation and nationality that collectivity is most often expressed, there is an urgent need to disengage the possibilities of genuine action within these areas.
This sweeping collection of essays ranges from the elusive politics of North American literature to the sometimes frozen narrative experiences of the eastern countries and the Soviet Union and beyond. This is a voyage traversing the globe, discovering a common kinship between each literary destination in late capitalism itself.
Table of contents:
Introduction
1. Allegories of the Hunter
2. Limits of the Gringo Novel
3. Form-Problems in Henry James
4. Language and Conspiracy in Delillo and Yurick
5. The Autonomous Work of Art: Utopian Plot-Formation in The Wire
6. Flashes of World War II
7. Germany”s Double Plots
8. An Eastern Waiting Room
9. Immortal Stalingrad
10. The USSR that Wasn”t
11. Faith and Conspiracy in Japan
12. History as a Family Novel
13. The Religions of Dystopia
14. Fear and Loathing in Globalization
15. The Novel and the Supermarket
16. Temporalities of the Sea
17. A Businessman in Love
18. The Failure of Success
19. Days of the Messiah
Index
Review quote:
Fredric Jameson is America”s leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction.
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Exploding like so many magnesium flares in the night sky, Fredric Jameson”s writings have lit up the shrouded landscape of the postmodern.
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Jameson has long been the most alluring American literary theorist, the only one to match the French in style and depth.
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Not often in American writing since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force. The best of Jameson”s work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms.
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The most muscular of writers.
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Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today. It can truly be said that nothing cultural is alien to him.
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Jameson thinks dialectically in the strong sense, in the way we are all supposed to think but almost no one does.
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Jameson”s latest book shows him at the height of his powers, carving out his novel alternative.
Biographical note:
Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture”s relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Tu
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