In Memoriam: Frederic Jameson

Born in 1934, Fredric Jameson was the William A. Lane Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University—a university where he had taught since 1985. Broad-ranging and extensive in his research in and critique of social and cultural forms, Jameson’s work has influenced several generations of scholars across the globe in a wide array of studies in literature, as well as cultural studies, film studies, musicology, etc. Cornel West has called Jameson “The most significant Marxist thinker in American culture.”

Jameson was conferred the Holberg Prize in a formal ceremony on 26 November 2008 in Bergen. At the Holberg Symposium the previous day, he gave his Holberg Lecture on the theme “Foreign Relations in World Literature”.

The Holberg Committee’s recommendation for awarding Fredric Jameson the 2008 Holberg Prize is reproduced here in extenso:

Fredric R. Jameson has made outstanding contributions to the understanding of the relation between social formations and cultural forms in a project he himself describes as the “poetics of social forms”. His work combines profound theoretical and philosophical ideas with painstaking fidelity to particular cultural objects.

While always grounded in literary studies, Jameson has provided significant insights into cultural studies, hermeneutics, architectural and postcolonial theory, as well as in aesthetics, film and television studies, and history. His research explores an unusually wide variety of different cultural objects from a broad geographical range. He has written on the classical European literary tradition from the Middle Ages to the present; the tradition of Western aesthetic theory; European, North American and Asian film; science fiction and utopias; Swedish crime fiction; Rem Kolhaas’s buildings; Liszt’s symphonies; and modern Chinese poetry. Much of this work is available in important anthologies such as The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 1 and 2 (1988), Signatures of the Visible (1991) and Archaeologies of the Future (2005).

Famous for his dictum “Always historicize!” Jameson understands the cultural artifact within the context of a given social and historical formation, while reorienting the tradition of Western Marxist cultural theory. Resisting the temptation to see each work as simply the expression of its social context, Jameson looks for the extent to which writers or other artists have tried to “escape from history”. Characteristic of Jameson’s work is its openness to a great diversity of views, including those far from the Marxist tradition, and his capacity to incorporate and acknowledge them in his own syntheses. Marxism and Form (1971) and The Prison-House of Language (1972) were path-breaking studies of formalism and the “linguistic turn”, at once admiring and critical. The fullest development of Jameson’s theory of interpretation is elaborated in The Political Unconscious (1981) through memorable readings of authors such as Balzac, Gissing and Conrad.

Jameson’s most lasting contribution to cultural analysis may be his account of postmodernism and postmodernity. His epochal book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) established the concept of postmodernity as a distinct period with its own specific social and cultural forms. The account of postmodernity is shaped by Jameson’s continued engagement with modernism and modernity, beginning with Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (1979) and culminating with A Singular Modernity (2002) and The Modernist Papers (2007).

Widely translated, Jameson’s work has had extraordinary global impact, not only in Europe and North America but, to an unusual degree, also in Asia.

After receiving the 2008 Holberg Prize, Fredric Jameson continued his work of reading and critique, including also contributing texts on particular topics and authors to more popular journals and outlets. This includes The London Review of Books where he contributed a number of pieces until 2022, including on everything from Karl Ove Knausgaard and Slavoj Žižek to Tel Quel and the tropes of time travel.

He continued, however, to also share his work and thought in the book format with publications such as The Ideologies of Theory (2009), Valences of the Dialectic (2009) and The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit (2010). His book The Antinomies of Realism (2013) won the 2014 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. With An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army (2016) he critically took on leftist notions of emancipation while in one of the last book-length publications to date, the work Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization (2024), Jameson provides a glimpse of his readings of great authors’ novels and their ideas and imaginaries. Actively contributing also with fine-grained analyses of literature, philosophy and language, one of the texts Jameson published last was entitled “Schematizations, or How to Draw a Thought” in the journal Critical Enquiry in September 2023—an analysis of visual schemas in a selection of influential French thought.

Characterized by shifts and a wide span in his intellectual orientation across the more than half a century of work—turns that also entailed writings on the formation of utopias, Japanese architecture and time travel—Jameson remained a strong and decidedly original voice until his passing.