Mapping Theory

As new generations of academics mature the major theorists of the Twentieth Century become further removed from the critical “present.” Baby-boomer scholars who came of age during an era of dramatic cultural transformation were able to link their precarious circumstances to their professional lives under the auspices of various new theoretical developments. At the time of their initial appearance, names such as Derrida and Foucault were not simply items on a syllabus, sections in an anthology, or chapters of an introductory guide to literary theory, but living examples of the intersection between academic scholarship and real world politics. In an age where humanities departments might resemble Eliot’s Wasteland occupied by both professorial Gerontions and Hollow Men, where theory and philosophy often appear in the guise of compressed companions, handbooks, and guides, to what degree will current students and future generations, along with readers coming into contact with a difficult body of material for the first time decades after its initial appearance, feel the exigency that work?

Robert T. Tally’s Fredric Jameson and the Project of Dialectical Criticism offers a portrait of a major critic that simultaneously introduces his complex theoretical agenda and demonstrates its continued relevance for understanding our changing multifarious world. “Jameson is arguably the leading literary and cultural critic [and Marxist thinker] in the world today,” writes Tally, but the interested reader might not know where to begin as they encounter his voluminous bibliography that includes over twenty books and hundreds of miscellaneous writings. When we add to this massive achievement the fact that Jameson’s thinking emerges out of such notoriously difficult thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno, G. W. F. Hegel (and Marx too, of course), and alongside, and in contradistinction to, virtually the entire history of philosophy, the student or casual reader is sure to feel a bit overwhelmed, possibly alienated. Within this scene of potential disorientation Tally’s concise study offers a broad and sweeping overview of Jameson’s “project of dialectical criticism” that is accessible and demanding in its attempt both to introduce Jameson’s thought and demonstrate its continued relevance and potential.

As Tally surmises:

Jameson’s overall body of work constitutes an exploration of consciousness, representation, narrative, interpretation, history, utopia, and the world system. Reading Jameson’s writings involves a similarly exploratory project … [and] I hope this work functions as an adventurer’s guide for those who, through readings his books, wish to accompany Jameson in the adventures of the dialectic.

This array of terms touches upon most of the key words governing the history of philosophy, theory, and literature and, as Tally suggests, “reading Jameson’s books is like a graduate-level education in comparative literature, literary criticism, and cultural theory.” After opening with an eloquent tribute to his own experience in Jameson’s classroom, in this text Tally becomes his old professor’s assistant as he guides us through a course that consists of the teacher’s oeuvre: from the early work on Sartre, Marxist thinkers, structuralism, his famous studies of The Political Unconscious (1981), Postmodernism (1991), to his later work on Modernism and Utopia, and up through his most recent studies of Hegel and Marx’s Capital (1867), along with everything in between (this study appeared prior to the publication of The Antinomies of Realism [2013]). This survey is less a lecture and more a seminar that shows how Jameson’s thought “may enable us to situate ourselves historically…and to imagine potential alternatives” to the world in which we live. Rather than offer idiosyncratic academic arguments and unnecessarily rigorous readings, Tally broadly situates each moment of Jameson’s career into its specific historical locale and larger frame of reference. That is, Tally keeps one eye on the changes occurring in Jameson’s career, the academy, and world history at large, with the other eye unrelentingly fixated on the importance of these changes to the overarching project of dialectical criticism. Plumbing Jameson’s texts thus provides the occasion to offer readings...