The Poetics of Social Forms: The Legacy

Fredric Jameson was the foremost Marxist thinker of the United States in the post-War period. His dialectical presentation of European thought set the terms of reception and debate of many of the European figures, ideas, and approaches that instigated a tumultuous rethinking of the humanities in U.S. academia from the 70s to the 90s. Amid that reception, he developed his own enormously influential approach to criticize the modern and postmodern cultural logics of capitalism and late capitalism. Although his oeuvre sprawls, it spirals through a series of themes: ideology and mass culture, narrative and History, the triad of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, periodization and cultural revolution, temporality and Utopia. This seminar charts one path through his prodigious theorizing.