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88-428: Fredric Ruff Jameson (April 14, 1934 – September 22, 2024) was an American literary critic , philosopher and Marxist political theorist . He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism . Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981). Jameson

176-544: A BA in French with highest honors at Haverford College , where he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society in his junior year . His professors at Haverford included Wayne Booth , to whom A Singular Modernity (2002) is dedicated. After graduation in 1954 he briefly traveled to Europe, studying at Aix-en-Provence , Munich, and Berlin , where he learned of new developments in continental philosophy , including

264-523: A New York -born medical doctor with his own private practice, and Bernice née Ruff ( c. 1904–1966), a Michigan -born Barnard College graduate who did not work outside the family home. Both his parents had non-wage income over $ 50 in 1939 (about USD$ 1130 in 2024). By April 1935 he moved with his parents to Gloucester City, New Jersey , and by 1949 the family occupied a house in the nearby middle-class suburb of Haddon Heights, New Jersey . He graduated from Moorestown Friends School in 1950. He completed

352-571: A "sequence" and "project" entitled The Poetics of Social Forms . This project attempts, in Sara Danius 's words, to "provide a general history of aesthetic forms, at the same time seeking to show how this history can be read in tandem with a history of social and economic formations". While the individual works are formally named on the flyleaf of Inventions of a Present , its more nuanced structure—six volumes comprising seven publications grouped into three subdivisions—can be gleaned from mentions in

440-456: A Style . Auerbach's concerns were rooted in the German philological tradition; his works on the history of style analyzed literary form within social history . 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. Jameson's work focused on the relation between

528-460: A commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit ; and Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (2011), an analysis of Marx's Das Kapital . An overview of Jameson's work, Fredric Jameson: Live Theory, by Ian Buchanan , was published in 2007. Jameson was married to Susan Willis, and had three daughters. He died at his home in Killingworth, Connecticut , on September 22, 2024, at

616-441: A cultural phenomenon. Instead, Jameson insists upon a Hegelian immanent critique that would "think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together". Some of Jameson's other well-known concepts and philosophical contributions —not mentioned in the preceding section or tangential to his critique of postmodernism— include the concepts of "cognitive mapping" (adapted from Kevin A. Lynch ;

704-459: A form of class consciousness mediated by popular culture that corresponds to the era of capitalist globalization ), the " vanishing mediator ", totality as conspiracy, "alternate modernity" (the postcolonial notion of distinct regional pathways of capitalism, linked to the political project of BRICS ), and antagonism as the principle of totalisation. Several of Jameson’s later works, along with Postmodernism , are part of what he called both

792-537: A form of hermeneutics : knowledge via interpretation to understand the meaning of human texts and symbolic expressions – including the interpretation of texts which themselves interpret other texts. In the British and American literary establishment, the New Criticism was more or less dominant until the late 1960s. Around that time Anglo-American university literature departments began to witness

880-496: A form of mass-culture driven by capitalism, pervades every aspect of our daily lives. Two of Jameson's best-known claims from Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism are that post-modernity is characterized by " pastiche " and a "crisis in historicity ". And since postmodernism —as was mentioned above —represents the form of an enormous cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style, rather than

968-456: A materialist reading of moments of struggle and revolt, utopia and liberation in cultural texts." Another memorial essay in The Nation observed that Jameson has emerged as a figure who "not only amassed one of the most impressive bodies of work within his field but who also was, fundamentally, someone who believed in criticism as a discourse, between teacher and pupil, between the work and

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1056-501: A nit-picking classicist" and only the "technical research into languages and families". In The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis , the main character, Elwin Ransom, is a philologist – as was Lewis' close friend J. R. R. Tolkien . Dr. Edward Morbius, one of the main characters in the science fiction film Forbidden Planet , is a philologist. Philip, the main character of Christopher Hampton 's 'bourgeois comedy' The Philanthropist ,

1144-560: A philosophical or cultural text must be carried out in the same terms that text itself employs, in order to develop its internal inconsistencies in a manner that allows intellectual advancement. Marx highlighted immanent critique in his early writings, derived from Hegel's development of a new form of dialectical thinking that would attempt, as Jameson comments, "to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps". History came to play an increasingly central role in Jameson's interpretation of both

1232-643: A position at Harvard University . His interest in Sartre led Jameson to intense study of Marxist literary theory . Even though Karl Marx was becoming an important influence in American social science , partly through the influence of the many European intellectuals who had sought refuge from the Second World War in the United States, such as Theodor Adorno , the literary and critical work of

1320-502: A profound influence on the study of secular texts. This was particularly the case for the literary traditions of the three Abrahamic religions : Jewish literature , Christian literature and Islamic literature . Literary criticism was also employed in other forms of medieval Arabic literature and Arabic poetry from the 9th century, notably by Al-Jahiz in his al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan , and by Abdullah ibn al-Mu'tazz in his Kitab al-Badi . The literary criticism of

1408-473: A reconstructed text accompanied by a " critical apparatus ", i.e., footnotes that listed the various manuscript variants available, enabling scholars to gain insight into the entire manuscript tradition and argue about the variants. A related study method known as higher criticism studies the authorship, date, and provenance of text to place such text in a historical context. As these philological issues are often inseparable from issues of interpretation, there

1496-617: A rise of a more explicitly philosophical literary theory , influenced by structuralism , then post-structuralism , and other kinds of Continental philosophy . It continued until the mid-1980s, when interest in "theory" peaked. Many later critics, though undoubtedly still influenced by theoretical work, have been comfortable simply interpreting literature rather than writing explicitly about methodology and philosophical presumptions. Today, approaches based in literary theory and continental philosophy largely coexist in university literature departments, while conventional methods, some informed by

1584-531: A script used in the ancient Aegean, was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick , who demonstrated that it recorded an early form of Greek, now known as Mycenaean Greek . Linear A , the writing system that records the still-unknown language of the Minoans , resists deciphering, despite many attempts. Work continues on scripts such as the Maya , with great progress since the initial breakthroughs of

1672-482: Is Jameson’s contribution to a conception and analysis of postmodernism that has had the most impact in its breadth and reach. At the time of his death in 2024, it was generally recognized that he was the preeminent critic of postmodernism. Jameson’s contention was that postmodernism is the cultural expression of our own current period of Late capitalism . Postmodernism represents the form of an enormous cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style, rather than

1760-588: Is a professor of philology in an English university town . Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld , the main character in Alexander McCall Smith 's 1997 comic novel Portuguese Irregular Verbs is a philologist, educated at Cambridge. The main character in the Academy Award Nominee for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012, Footnote , is a Hebrew philologist, and a significant part of the film deals with his work. The main character of

1848-569: Is central to all of Jameson’s work.” Jameson has had an influence on the theorization of the postmodern in China. In mid-1985, shortly after the beginning of the cultural fever (early 1985 to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre )—a period in Chinese intellectual history characterized in part by intense interest in Western critical theory , literary theory , and related disciplines—Jameson discussed

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1936-462: Is contrasted with linguistics due to Ferdinand de Saussure 's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis . While the contrast continued with the emergence of structuralism and the emphasis of Noam Chomsky on syntax , research in historical linguistics often relies on philological materials and findings. The term philology is derived from the Greek φιλολογία ( philología ), from

2024-516: Is no clear-cut boundary between philology and hermeneutics . When text has a significant political or religious influence (such as the reconstruction of Biblical texts), scholars have difficulty reaching objective conclusions. Some scholars avoid all critical methods of textual philology, especially in historical linguistics, where it is important to study the actual recorded materials. The movement known as new philology has rejected textual criticism because it injects editorial interpretations into

2112-460: Is now constructed. As Jonathan Culler has observed, The Political Unconscious emerged as an alternative method to interpret literary narratives. The book's argument emphasized history as the "ultimate horizon" of literary and cultural analysis . It borrowed notions from the structuralist tradition and from Raymond Williams 's work in cultural studies , and joined them to a largely Marxist view of labor (whether blue-collar or intellectual) as

2200-539: Is often influenced by literary theory , which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists. Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory is a matter of some controversy. For example, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism draws no distinction between literary theory and literary criticism, and almost always uses

2288-417: Is treated amongst other scholars, as noted by both the philologists R.D Fulk and Leonard Neidorf who have been quoted saying "This field "philology's commitment to falsification renders it "at odds with what many literary scholars believe because the purpose of philology is to narrow the range of possible interpretations rather than to treat all reasonable ones as equal". This use of falsification can be seen in

2376-580: The London Review of Books , the Dublin Review of Books , The Nation , Bookforum , and The New Yorker . Literary criticism is thought to have existed as far back as the classical period. In the 4th century BC Aristotle wrote the Poetics , a typology and description of literary forms with many specific criticisms of contemporary works of art. Poetics developed for the first time

2464-483: The Enlightenment period (1700s–1800s), literary criticism became more popular. During this time literacy rates started to rise in the public; no longer was reading exclusive for the wealthy or scholarly. With the rise of the literate public, the swiftness of printing and commercialization of literature, criticism arose too. Reading was no longer viewed solely as educational or as a sacred source of religion; it

2552-702: The Frankfurt School , such as Kenneth Burke , György Lukács , Ernst Bloch , Theodor Adorno , Walter Benjamin , Herbert Marcuse , Louis Althusser , and Sartre, who viewed cultural criticism as an integral feature of Marxist theory. In 1969, Jameson co-founded the Marxist Literary Group with a number of his graduate students at the University of California, San Diego. While the Orthodox Marxist view of ideology held that

2640-797: The Middle French philologie , in the sense of 'love of literature'. The adjective φιλόλογος ( philólogos ) meant 'fond of discussion or argument, talkative', in Hellenistic Greek , also implying an excessive (" sophistic ") preference of argument over the love of true wisdom, φιλόσοφος ( philósophos ). As an allegory of literary erudition, philologia appears in fifth-century postclassical literature ( Martianus Capella , De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii ), an idea revived in Late Medieval literature ( Chaucer , Lydgate ). The meaning of "love of learning and literature"

2728-744: The New Critics , also remain active. Disagreements over the goals and methods of literary criticism, which characterized both sides taken by critics during the "rise" of theory, have declined. Some critics work largely with theoretical texts, while others read traditional literature; interest in the literary canon is still great, but many critics are also interested in nontraditional texts and women's literature , as elaborated on by certain academic journals such as Contemporary Women's Writing , while some critics influenced by cultural studies read popular texts like comic books or pulp / genre fiction . Ecocritics have drawn connections between literature and

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2816-500: The Renaissance developed classical ideas of unity of form and content into literary neoclassicism , proclaiming literature as central to culture, entrusting the poet and the author with preservation of a long literary tradition. The birth of Renaissance criticism was in 1498, with the recovery of classic texts, most notably, Giorgio Valla 's Latin translation of Aristotle 's Poetics . The work of Aristotle, especially Poetics ,

2904-556: The Roman and Byzantine Empire . It was eventually resumed by European scholars of the Renaissance , where it was soon joined by philologies of other European ( Romance , Germanic , Celtic ), Eurasian ( Slavic , etc.), Asian ( Arabic , Persian , Sanskrit , Chinese , etc.), and African ( Egyptian , Nubian , etc.) languages. Indo-European studies involve the comparative philology of all Indo-European languages . Philology, with its focus on historical development ( diachronic analysis),

2992-661: The Western Marxists was still largely unknown in American academia in the late-1950s and early-1960s. Jameson's shift toward Marxism was also driven by his increasing political connection with the New Left and pacifist movements, as well as by the Cuban Revolution , which Jameson took as a sign that "Marxism was alive and well as a collective movement and a culturally productive force". His research focused on critical theory : thinkers of, and influenced by,

3080-462: The history of the book is a field of interdisciplinary inquiry drawing on the methods of bibliography , cultural history , history of literature , and media theory . Principally concerned with the production, circulation, and reception of texts and their material forms, book history seeks to connect forms of textuality with their material aspects. Among the issues within the history of literature with which book history can be seen to intersect are:

3168-401: The ideologeme , or "the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes", the smallest legible residue of the real-life, ongoing struggles occurring between social classes. Jameson's establishment of history as the only pertinent factor in this analysis, which derived the categories governing artistic production from their historical framework,

3256-548: The Yahoos". The British Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century introduced new aesthetic ideas to literary studies, including the idea that the object of literature need not always be beautiful, noble, or perfect, but that literature itself could elevate a common subject to the level of the sublime . German Romanticism , which followed closely after the late development of German classicism , emphasized an aesthetic of fragmentation that can appear startlingly modern to

3344-546: The age of 90. The Modern Language Association (MLA) recognized Jameson throughout his career. In 1971, Jameson earned the MLA’s William Riley Parker Prize . Twenty years later, it awarded him its 1991 James Russell Lowell Prize for Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism . The latter has remained a landmark publication in its field since it was published in 1991, and is still Duke University Press’s all-time bestseller (as of 2024). Jameson

3432-599: The ancient languages of the Near East progressed rapidly. In the mid-19th century, Henry Rawlinson and others deciphered the Behistun Inscription , which records the same text in Old Persian , Elamite , and Akkadian , using a variation of cuneiform for each language. The elucidation of cuneiform led to the decipherment of Sumerian . Hittite was deciphered in 1915 by Bedřich Hrozný . Linear B ,

3520-422: The article into a book, which he published in 1991. 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. This differed from the most prominent views of the postmodern condition that existed at that time. In Jameson’s view, postmodernity's merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated whole

3608-514: The author's psychology or biography, which became almost taboo subjects) or reader response : together known as Wimsatt and Beardsley's intentional fallacy and affective fallacy . This emphasis on form and precise attention to "the words themselves" has persisted, after the decline of these critical doctrines themselves. In 1957 Northrop Frye published the influential Anatomy of Criticism . In his works Frye noted that some critics tend to embrace an ideology, and to judge literary pieces on

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3696-522: The basis of their adherence to such ideology. This has been a highly influential viewpoint among modern conservative thinkers. E. Michael Jones, for example, argues in his Degenerate Moderns that Stanley Fish was influenced by his own adulterous affairs to reject classic literature that condemned adultery. Jürgen Habermas , in Erkenntnis und Interesse [1968] ( Knowledge and Human Interests ), described literary critical theory in literary studies as

3784-453: The bearers of modernity, were reacting with shock and anxiety at their loss of control with the arrival of postmodern consumer society, uttering cries of "quixotic hysteria", panic-stricken by the realization of what they had once called for during the eighties. Literary criticism A genre of arts criticism , literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation , and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism

3872-694: The books themselves. Archaeologies of the Future is a study of utopia and science fiction that was launched at Monash University in Melbourne , Australia . The Antinomies of Realism won the 2014 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism . Alongside this project, Jameson published three related studies of dialectical theory : Valences of the Dialectic (2009), which includes Jameson's critical responses to Slavoj Žižek , Gilles Deleuze , and other contemporary theorists; The Hegel Variations (2010),

3960-455: The concepts of mimesis and catharsis , which are still crucial in literary studies. Plato 's attacks on poetry as imitative, secondary, and false were formative as well. The Sanskrit Natya Shastra includes literary criticism on ancient Indian literature and Sanskrit drama. Later classical and medieval criticism often focused on religious texts, and the several long religious traditions of hermeneutics and textual exegesis have had

4048-521: The cultural " superstructure " was completely determined by the economic "base" , the Western Marxists critically analyzed culture as a historical and social phenomenon alongside economic production and distribution or political power relationships. They held that culture must be studied using the Hegelian concept of immanent critique : the theory that adequate description and criticism of

4136-411: The cultural forms realism, modernism, and postmodernism.” The caustic edge of Jameson's theory, which had described postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism", was abandoned for a contented or even enthusiastic endorsement of mass culture, which [a certain group of Chinese critics] saw as a new space of popular freedom. According to these critics, intellectuals, who conceived of themselves as

4224-483: The debate surrounding the etymology of the Old English character Unferth from the heroic epic poem Beowulf . James Turner further disagrees with how the use of the term is dismissed in the academic world, stating that due to its branding as a "simpleminded approach to their subject" the term has become unknown to college-educated students, furthering the stereotypes of "scrutiny of ancient Greek or Roman texts of

4312-470: The development of authorship as a profession, the formation of reading audiences, the constraints of censorship and copyright, and the economics of literary form. Philology Classical philology studies classical languages . Classical philology principally originated from the Library of Pergamum and the Library of Alexandria around the fourth century BC, continued by Greeks and Romans throughout

4400-535: The famous decipherment and translation of the Rosetta Stone by Jean-François Champollion in 1822, some individuals attempted to decipher the writing systems of the Ancient Near East and Aegean . In the case of Old Persian and Mycenaean Greek , decipherment yielded older records of languages already known from slightly more recent traditions ( Middle Persian and Alphabetic Greek ). Work on

4488-480: The focal point of analysis. Jameson's readings exploited both the explicit formal and thematic choices of the writer and the unconscious framework guiding these. Artistic choices that were ordinarily viewed in purely aesthetic terms were recast in terms of historical literary practices and norms, in an attempt to develop a systematic inventory of the constraints they imposed on the artist as an individual creative subject. To further this meta-commentary, Jameson described

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4576-694: The height of his powers, carving out his novel alternative ... [and that] ... for over five decades, Fredric Jameson has been the leading Marxist literary and cultural critic in the United States, if not the world A memorial piece published by the editorial team of the Marxist journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory described Jameson as an "intellectual giant" responsible for an "enduring legacy that has inspired generations of thinkers, activists and scholars". They praised Jameson for his "militant commitment to

4664-619: The idea of postmodernism in China in lectures at Peking University and the newly founded Shenzhen University . In 1987, Jameson published a book entitled Postmodernism and Cultural Theories. Although the Chinese intelligentsia's engagement with postmodernism would not begin in earnest until the nineties, Postmodernism and Cultural Theories was to become a keystone text in that engagement; as scholar Wang Ning writes, its influence on Chinese thinkers would be impossible to overestimate. This debate over postmodernism, in part fueled by Jameson,

4752-576: 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. In 1985 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Auerbach would prove to be a lasting influence on Jameson's thought. This was already apparent in Jameson's doctoral dissertation , published in 1961 as Sartre: The Origins of

4840-399: The natural sciences. Darwinian literary studies studies literature in the context of evolutionary influences on human nature. And postcritique has sought to develop new ways of reading and responding to literary texts that go beyond the interpretive methods of critique . Many literary critics also work in film criticism or media studies . Related to other forms of literary criticism,

4928-587: The new direction taken in the early twentieth century. Early in the century the school of criticism known as Russian Formalism , and slightly later the New Criticism in Britain and in the United States, came to dominate the study and discussion of literature in the English-speaking world. Both schools emphasized the close reading of texts, elevating it far above generalizing discussion and speculation about either authorial intention (to say nothing of

5016-533: The occasion of presenting him with a lifetime achievement award: One would be hard put to find a humanities scholar who is more widely visible and more frequently cited across the disciplines, and who has sustained national and international critical attention for a more extended period of time than Fred Jameson Robert T. Tally Jr.'s review for Jacobin of the 2024 work Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization described Jameson as: at

5104-515: The original principles of textual criticism have been improved and applied to other widely distributed texts such as the Bible . Scholars have tried to reconstruct the original readings of the Bible from the manuscript variants. This method was applied to classical studies and medieval texts as a way to reconstruct the author's original work. The method produced so-called "critical editions", which provided

5192-524: The origins of older texts. Philology also includes the study of texts and their history. It includes elements of textual criticism , trying to reconstruct an author's original text based on variant copies of manuscripts. This branch of research arose among ancient scholars in the Greek-speaking world of the 4th century BC, who desired to establish a standard text of popular authors for both sound interpretation and secure transmission. Since that time,

5280-615: The phonetic approach championed by Yuri Knorozov and others in the 1950s. Since the late 20th century, the Maya code has been almost completely deciphered, and the Mayan languages are among the most documented and studied in Mesoamerica . The code is described as a logosyllabic style of writing. In English-speaking countries, usage of the term "philology" to describe work on languages and works of literature, which had become synonymous with

5368-462: The postmodern era suffers from a crisis in historicity: "there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the [...] history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current, multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life". Jameson's analysis of postmodernism attempts to view it as historically grounded; he therefore explicitly rejects any moralistic opposition to postmodernity as

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5456-632: The practices of German scholars, was abandoned as a consequence of anti-German feelings following World War I . Most continental European countries still maintain the term to designate departments, colleges, position titles, and journals. J. R. R. Tolkien opposed the nationalist reaction against philological practices, claiming that "the philological instinct" was "universal as is the use of language". In British English usage, and British academia, philology remains largely synonymous with "historical linguistics", while in US English , and US academia,

5544-532: The production of goods, Jameson argued that parody (which implies a moral judgment or a comparison with societal norms) was replaced by pastiche ( collage and other forms of juxtaposition without a normative grounding). 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. Relatedly, Jameson argues that

5632-417: The production of goods. Jameson developed this form of analysis during a time when “an art-historical debate had wondered for several years whether our age had moved beyond modern art and on to ‘postmodern’ art”. 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 . He later expanded

5720-450: The public". “Following Ernest Mandel's periodization in his book Late Capitalism (1975), Jameson claims that "there have been three fundamental moments in capitalism, each one marking a dialectical expansion over the previous stage. These are market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own, wrongly called postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational, capital". To these forms of society correspond

5808-501: The publication of Emanuele Tesauro 's Il Cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope) in 1654. This seminal treatise – inspired by Giambattista Marino 's epic Adone and the work of the Spanish Jesuit philosopher Baltasar Gracián – developed a theory of metaphor as a universal language of images and as a supreme intellectual act, at once an artifice and an epistemologically privileged mode of access to truth. In

5896-447: The reader of English literature, and valued Witz – that is, "wit" or "humor" of a certain sort – more highly than the serious Anglophone Romanticism. The late nineteenth century brought renown to authors known more for their literary criticism than for their own literary work, such as Matthew Arnold . However important all of these aesthetic movements were as antecedents, current ideas about literary criticism derive almost entirely from

5984-429: The reading (consumption) and writing (production) of literary texts . 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" (1981). The Political Unconscious takes as its object not the literary text itself, but rather the interpretive frameworks by which it

6072-449: The relationship between languages. Similarities between Sanskrit and European languages were first noted in the early 16th century and led to speculation of a common ancestor language from which all these descended. It is now named Proto-Indo-European . Philology's interest in ancient languages led to the study of what was, in the 18th century, "exotic" languages, for the light they could cast on problems in understanding and deciphering

6160-508: The results of human mental processes. This science compares the results of textual science with the results of experimental research of both psychology and artificial intelligence production systems. In the case of Bronze Age literature , philology includes the prior decipherment of the language under study. This has notably been the case with the Egyptian , Sumerian , Assyrian , Hittite , Ugaritic , and Luwian languages. Beginning with

6248-502: The rise of structuralism . He 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 . From 1959 to 1967 he taught French and Comparative Literature at Harvard University . He was employed by the University of California, San Diego from 1967 to 1976, where he worked alongside Herbert Marcuse and

6336-577: The style of Sartre's writings and the political and ethical positions of his existentialist philosophy. The occasional Marxian aspects of Sartre's work were glossed over in this book; Jameson would return to them in the following decade. Jameson's dissertation, though it drew on a long tradition of European cultural analysis, differed markedly from the prevailing trends of Anglo-American academia (which were empiricism and logical positivism in philosophy and linguistics , and New Critical formalism in literary criticism ). It nevertheless earned Jameson

6424-515: The terms φίλος ( phílos ) 'love, affection, loved, beloved, dear, friend' and λόγος ( lógos ) 'word, articulation, reason', describing a love of learning, of literature, as well as of argument and reasoning, reflecting the range of activities included under the notion of λόγος . The term changed little with the Latin philologia , and later entered the English language in the 16th century, from

6512-606: The terms together to describe the same concept. Some critics consider literary criticism a practical application of literary theory, because criticism always deals directly with particular literary works, while theory may be more general or abstract. Literary criticism is often published in essay or book form. Academic literary critics teach in literature departments and publish in academic journals , and more popular critics publish their reviews in broadly circulating periodicals such as The Times Literary Supplement , The New York Times Book Review , The New York Review of Books ,

6600-404: The text and destroys the integrity of the individual manuscript, hence damaging the reliability of the data. Supporters of new philology insist on a strict "diplomatic" approach: a faithful rendering of the text exactly as found in the manuscript, without emendations. Another branch of philology, cognitive philology, studies written and oral texts. Cognitive philology considers these oral texts as

6688-401: The wider meaning of "study of a language's grammar, history and literary tradition" remains more widespread. Based on the harsh critique of Friedrich Nietzsche, some US scholars since the 1980s have viewed philology as responsible for a narrowly scientistic study of language and literature. Disagreements in the modern day of this branch of study are followed with the likes of how the method

6776-408: Was a form of entertainment. Literary criticism was influenced by the values and stylistic writing, including clear, bold, precise writing and the more controversial criteria of the author's religious beliefs. These critical reviews were published in many magazines, newspapers, and journals. The commercialization of literature and its mass production had its downside. The emergent literary market, which

6864-614: Was again recognized by the MLA, this time in 2012, with its MLA Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2008, 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". The prize, which was worth 4.6 million  kr (approximately $ 648,000), was presented to Jameson by Tora Aasland , Norwegian Minister of Education and Research , in Bergen , Norway , on November 26, 2008. In 2009, Jameson

6952-493: Was at its most intense from 1994 to 1997, carried on by Chinese intellectuals both inside and outside the mainland; particularly important contributions came from Zhao Yiheng in London, Xu Ben in the United States, and Zhang Xudong, also in the United States, who had gone on to study under Jameson as a doctoral student at Duke . In 2011, Rey Chow , then chair of Duke University's literature program, reflected on Jameson's career on

7040-608: Was awarded the Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award by the North American Society for Utopian Studies . Jameson was given credit for his ”significant role in introducing to an English reading audience the rich theorizations of Utopia found in German critical theory, in works written by Walter Benjamin , Herbert Marcuse , and most significantly, Ernst Bloch .” It was also noted that “the question of Utopia

7128-608: Was expected to educate the public and keep them away from superstition and prejudice, increasingly diverged from the idealistic control of the Enlightenment theoreticians so that the business of Enlightenment became a business with the Enlightenment. This development – particularly of emergence of entertainment literature – was addressed through an intensification of criticism. Many works of Jonathan Swift , for instance, were criticized including his book Gulliver's Travels , which one critic described as "the detestable story of

7216-413: Was narrowed to "the study of the historical development of languages" ( historical linguistics ) in 19th-century usage of the term. Due to the rapid progress made in understanding sound laws and language change , the "golden age of philology" lasted throughout the 19th century, or "from Giacomo Leopardi and Friedrich Schlegel to Nietzsche ". The comparative linguistics branch of philology studies

7304-461: Was paired with a bold theoretical claim. His 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. According to Vincent B. Leitch, the publication of The Political Unconscious "rendered Jameson the leading Marxist literary critic in America." It

7392-694: Was the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of Romance Studies (French), and Director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University . In 2012, the Modern Language Association gave Jameson its sixth Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement. Fredric Ruff Jameson was born in Cleveland , Ohio , on April 14, 1934. He was the only child of Frank S. Jameson ( c. 1890–?),

7480-452: Was the initial doctoral advisor for Kim Stanley Robinson 's thesis on Philip K. Dick . He taught classes on Marxist literary criticism , the Frankfurt School , the French novel and poetry , and Sartre . He was then hired by Yale University through Paul de Man in 1976, and by the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1983. In 1985 he joined Duke University as Professor of Literature and Professor of Romance Studies. He established

7568-536: Was the most important influence upon literary criticism until the late eighteenth century. Lodovico Castelvetro was one of the most influential Renaissance critics who wrote commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics in 1570. The seventeenth-century witnessed the first full-fledged crisis in modernity of the core critical-aesthetic principles inherited from classical antiquity , such as proportion, harmony, unity, decorum , that had long governed, guaranteed, and stabilized Western thinking about artworks. Although Classicism

7656-444: Was the result of the colonization of the cultural sphere—which had retained at least partial autonomy during the prior modernist era—by a newly organized corporate capitalism . Following Adorno and Horkheimer 's analysis of the culture industry , Jameson discussed this phenomenon in his critical discussion of architecture, film, narrative, and visual arts, as well as in his strictly philosophical work. For Jameson, postmodernism, as

7744-557: Was very far from spent as a cultural force, it was to be gradually challenged by a rival movement, namely Baroque, that favoured the transgressive and the extreme, without laying claim to the unity, harmony, or decorum that supposedly distinguished both nature and its greatest imitator, namely ancient art. The key concepts of the Baroque aesthetic, such as " conceit ' ( concetto ), " wit " ( acutezza , ingegno ), and " wonder " ( meraviglia ), were not fully developed in literary theory until

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