29 Facts About Fredric Jameson

Fredric Ruff Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist.

Fredric Jameson was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism.

Fredric Jameson was the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of Romance Studies, and Director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University.

Fredric Ruff Jameson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 14,1934.

Fredric Jameson returned to America the following year to study at Yale University under Erich Auerbach in pursuit of a PhD, which was awarded in 1959 for a dissertation on The Origins of Sartre's Style.

Fredric Jameson was employed by the University of California, San Diego from 1967 to 1976, where he worked alongside Herbert Marcuse.

Fredric Jameson taught classes on Marxist literary criticism, the Frankfurt School, the French novel and poetry, and Sartre.

Fredric Jameson was then hired by Yale University through Paul de Man in 1976, and by the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1983.

Fredric Jameson established the literary studies program at Duke and held the William A Lane Professorship of Comparative Literature, renamed in 2013, as Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professorship of Comparative Literature.

Fredric Jameson would follow in these steps, examining the articulation of poetry, history, philology, and philosophy in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, who was the subject of his dissertation.

Fredric Jameson's work focused on the relation between the style of Sartre's writings and the political and ethical positions of his existentialist philosophy.

In 1969, Fredric Jameson co-founded the Marxist Literary Group with a number of his graduate students at the University of California, San Diego.

Fredric Jameson marked his full-fledged commitment to Hegelian-Marxist philosophy with the publication of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, the opening slogan of which is "always historicize".

Fredric Jameson's readings exploited both the explicit formal and thematic choices of the writer and the unconscious framework guiding these.

Fredric Jameson's book claimed to establish Marxian literary criticism, centered in the notion of an artistic mode of production, as the most all-inclusive and comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding literature.

Fredric Jameson's contention was that postmodernism is the cultural expression of our own current period of late capitalism.

Fredric Jameson joined in on the debate in 1984 with his article titled "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" that was first published in the journal New Left Review.

Fredric Jameson later expanded the article into a book, which he published in 1991.

Fredric Jameson's argument centered around his assertion that the various phenomena of the postmodern had been, or could have been, understood successfully within a modernist framework.

Fredric Jameson recognized that modernism frequently "quotes" from different cultures and historical periods, but he argues that postmodern cultural texts indiscriminately cannibalize these elements, erasing any sense of critical or historical distance, resulting in pure pastiche.

Alongside this project, Fredric Jameson published three related studies of dialectical theory: Valences of the Dialectic, which includes Fredric Jameson's critical responses to Slavoj Zizek, Gilles Deleuze, and other contemporary theorists; The Hegel Variations, a commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit; and Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One, an analysis of Marx's Das Kapital.

Fredric Jameson was married to Janet Fredric Jameson, and then to Susan Willis, and had two sons and five daughters in the two marriages.

Fredric Jameson died at his home in Killingworth, Connecticut, on September 22,2024, at the age of 90.

In 1971, Fredric Jameson earned the MLA's William Riley Parker Prize.

Fredric Jameson was again recognized by the MLA, this time in 2012, with its MLA Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 2008, Fredric Jameson was awarded the annual Holberg International Memorial Prize in recognition of his career-long research "on the relation between social formations and cultural forms".

In 2009, Fredric Jameson was awarded the Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award by the North American Society for Utopian Studies.

Fredric Jameson has had an influence on the theorization of the postmodern in China.

In 1987, Fredric Jameson published a book entitled Postmodernism and Cultural Theories.