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Reviewed by:
  • On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization
  • Nicholas Brown
Caren Irr and Ian Buchanan, eds. On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization. Albany: SUNY P, 2005. 290 pp.

The first question to ask about an edited volume is: why does it exist? The material on Jameson in English is relatively meager considering the extent of his influence, and so any book dedicated to a close engagement with his work is welcome. By a slightly more ambitious commonsense criterion—a volume like this should collect important essays on an important topic in a more or less coherent way—the book succeeds admirably. In a remarkably consistent volume, the essays by Caroline Lesjak on Jameson's method, Roland Boer on metacommentary, Vitaly Chernetsky on Jameson's post-Soviet reception, Ian Buchanan and Imre Szeman (separately) on the concept of national allegory, Caren Irr on Jameson's American dialectic, and Philip Wegner on the function of style in Jameson call for particular mention. I suspect, however, that the editors had something far more ambitious in mind: to make a generational statement about the importance for the present moment not so much of Jameson himself as a figure, but of the conceptual apparatus he has elaborated with such rigor and elegance over his long career.

The most convincing way to do this would be to continue the elaboration of this apparatus, to take it in new directions, to try it out on new material: in short, to write more "from Jameson" than "on Jameson": to put it melodramatically, to remain true to what is most important in Jameson's work by taking it away from Jameson himself. But the course taken by most of the authors in this volume, with the exception of Robert Seguin's very Jamesonian entry and a wobbly contribution by Michael Rothberg, is instead to circle around the figure of Jameson. And while the overall quality of these essays is very high, their appearance together has the unfortunate effect of appearing to assemble a "defense of Jameson." Some of the best essays, in fact—I am thinking of Ian Buchanan's "National Allegory Today" and Imre Szeman's "Who's Afraid of National Allegory," both of which have appeared elsewhere—are explicitly defenses. The infamous "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" essay that Buchanan and Szeman stand up for has, it is true, been egregiously and almost universally misunderstood. It does, however, bear some conceptual flaws, inessential as these may be; more importantly, it was, in its net impact, a crashing disaster. If the brilliant core of that essay is worth preserving, the best approach may not be to spend a lot of energy defending the article itself, but to build on its fundamental insights. The essays by Szeman and Buchanan, both well-argued and in my view correct, elicited silent cheers from me in their previous lives as journal articles. Here, however, their overarching effect alongside several other evaluative essays—including Sean Homer's defense of Jameson against Sean Homer—is to suggest that what Jameson primarily needs is defenders, which could not be further from the case.

Not all of the essays are straightforwardly pro-Jameson, though the more critical essays can't but appear in context as part of a pro/con debate. In the most interesting of these, Roland Boer argues convincingly and elegantly, with a good deal of suggestive observation along the way, that Jameson's method works in two directions. On one hand, it is a "translation mechanism" (Jameson's words) for moving between and among various critical discourses, which then become like so many languages, one perhaps more efficient at this or [End Page 337] that but none inherently superior to any other. On the other, one of these discourses—Marxism—is asserted to be superior to, indeed the untranscendable horizon of, all other discourses. Boer finds a contradiction here: Jameson can take part in the neoliberal marketplace of ideas or a paleomarxist master narrative, but not both. Of course, there is no contradiction, even if it is extraordinarily difficult to keep both sides of this dialectic going at once. For Jameson's own metaphor is not that of the...

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