The Prison-House of Translation? Carceral Models, Translational Turns

Fredric Jameson’s classic work of 1972, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, stands out historically as an inquiry into what a model is in the comparative humanities of the postwar period. Though his particular focus in the book is on the linguistic turn (posed against Marxist formalism), his consideration of the model bears directly on “turn theory,” be it deconstructive, cultural, historicist, postcolonial, or cognitive.