Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson
Jameson in 2004
Born	(1934-04-14)April 14, 1934 Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Died	September 22, 2024(2024-09-22) (aged 90) Killingworth, Connecticut, U.S.
Alma mater	Haverford College Yale University
Spouse	Susan Willis
Children	3
Era	20th-/21st-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Western Marxism Marxist hermeneutics
Institutions	Harvard University (1959–1967) University of California, San Diego (1967–1976) Yale University (1976–1983) University of California, Santa Cruz (1983–1985) Duke University (1985–2024)
Thesis	The Origins of Sartre's Style (1959)
Doctoral advisor	Erich Auerbach
Doctoral students	Kim Stanley Robinson
Other notable students	John Beverley
Main interests	Marxist cultural analysis utopia Marxist literary criticism history postmodernism structuralism cultural studies science fiction modernism narrative dialectics
Notable ideas	Cognitive mapping National allegory Political unconscious

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 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.

Life and works

Frederick Ruff Jameson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 14, 1934. He was the only child of Frank S. Jameson (c.1890–?), 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. Both his parents had non-wage income over $50 in 1939. By April 1935 he moved with his parents to Gloucester City, Camden County, New Jersey, and by 1949 the family occupied a house in the middle-class suburb of Haddon Heights in the same county. He graduated from Moorestown Friends School in New Jersey in 1950.

He completed 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. 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 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.

Career summary

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 was the initial doctoral advisor for Kim Stanley Robinson's thesis on Philip K. Dick, then by Yale University from 1976 to 1983, and by the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1983 to 1985.

In 1985 he joined Duke University as Professor of Literature and Professor of Romance Studies. He 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.

In 1985 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Early works

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 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 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 a position at Harvard University.

Research into Marxism

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 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, 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 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 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".

Narrative and history

History came to play an increasingly central role in Jameson's interpretation of both 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 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 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 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. (The term "ideologeme" was first used by Mikhail Bakhtin and Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev in their work The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship and was later popularised by Julia Kristeva. Kristeva defined it as "the intersection of a given textual arrangement ... with the utterances ... that it either assimilates into its own space or to which it refers in the space of exterior texts ...".)

Jameson's establishment of history as the only pertinent factor in this analysis, which derived the categories governing artistic production from their historical framework, 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."

Critique of postmodernism

In 1984, during his tenure as Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Jameson published an article titled "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" in the journal New Left Review. This controversial article, which Jameson later expanded into a book, was part of a series of analyses of postmodernism from the dialectical perspective Jameson had developed in his earlier work on narrative. Jameson viewed the postmodern "skepticism towards metanarratives" as a "mode of experience" stemming from the conditions of intellectual labor imposed by the late capitalist mode of production.

Postmodernists claimed that the complex differentiation between "spheres" or fields of life (such as the political, the social, the cultural, the commercial), and between distinct social classes and roles within each field, had been overcome by the crisis of foundationalism and the consequent relativization of truth-claims. For example, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), which helped establish the term "postmodernism", Jean-François Lyotard described a shaken or failed public trust in the promise of enlightenments, faiths, or governments, with their metanarratives of epistemic or historical progress, leaving individuals to their own experiences. This was sometimes criticized as a metanarrative about the end of metanarratives and therefore considered ironic or paradoxical.

Jameson argued against postmodernists, asserting that these phenomena had or could have been understood successfully within a modernist framework; the postmodern failure to achieve this understanding implied an abrupt break in the dialectical refinement of thought. In his view, postmodernity's merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated whole 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.

Two of Jameson's best-known claims from Postmodernism are that post-modernity is characterized by "pastiche" and a "crisis in historicity". Jameson argues 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 recognizes 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 and resulting in pure pastiche. Relatedly, Jameson argues that the postmodern era suffers from a crisis in historicity: "there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the American 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 a cultural phenomenon, and continued to insist upon a Hegelian immanent critique that would "think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together". His refusal to simply dismiss postmodernism from the onset, however, was misinterpreted by some Marxist intellectuals as an implicit endorsement of postmodern views.

Later work

Jameson's later writings include Archaeologies of the Future, a study of utopia and science fiction, launched at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, in December 2005, and The Modernist Papers (2007), a collection of essays on modernism that is meant to accompany the theoretical A Singular Modernity (2002) as a "source-book". These books, along with Postmodernism and The Antinomies of Realism (2013), form part of an ongoing study entitled The Poetics of Social Forms, which 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". As of 2010, Jameson intends to supplement the already published volumes of The Poetics of Social Forms with a study of allegory entitled Overtones: The Harmonics of Allegory. 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), 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.

Personal life and death

Jameson was married to Susan Willis, and had three daughters. He died at his home in Killingworth, Connecticut, on September 22, 2024, at the age of 90.

Recognition, influence, and legacy

James Russell Lowell Prize

The Modern Language Association (MLA) awarded Jameson 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 (as of 2024) Duke University Press’s all-time bestseller.Jameson was again recognized by the MLA, this time in 2011, with its MLA Lifetime Achievement Award.

Holberg International Memorial Prize

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.

Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award

In 2009, Jameson 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 is central to all of Jameson’s work.”

Influence in China

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 massacre on June Fourth, 1989)—a period in Chinese intellectual history characterized in part by intense interest in Western critical theory, literary theory, and related disciplines—Jameson discussed the idea of postmodernism in China in lectures at Peking University and the newly founded Shenzhen University. Jameson's ideas as presented at Peking University had an impact on some students, including Zhang Yiwu and Zhang Xudong, scholars whose work would come to play an important role in the analysis of postmodernity in China. In 1987 Jameson published a book entitled Postmodernism and Cultural Theories (Chinese: 后现代主义与文化理论; pinyin: Hòuxiàndàizhǔyì yǔ wénhuà lǐlùn), translated into Chinese by Tang Xiaobing. 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. Its popularity may be partially due to the facts that it was not written in a dense style and that, because of Jameson's writing style, it was possible to use the text to support either praise or criticism of the Chinese manifestation of postmodernity. In Wang Chaohua's interpretation of events, Jameson's work was mostly used to support praise, in what amounted to a fundamental misreading of Jameson:

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 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.

The debate fueled by Jameson, and specifically Postmodernism and Cultural Theories, over postmodernism 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.

Legacy

Thirteen years before his death, Rey Chow, then chair of Duke University's literature program, reflected on Jameson's career on 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, in a Jacobin review of his 2024 work, Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization, published three weeks before his death described Jameson as "at the height of his powers, carving out his novel alternative", writing 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 a materialist reading of moments of struggle and revolt, utopia and liberation in cultural texts".

Publications

• Sartre: The Origins of a Style. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1961.
• Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1971.
• The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1972. for more info see:The prison-house of language : a critical account of structuralism and Russian formalism
• Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1979. Reissued: 2008 (Verso)
• The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 1981.
• "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" New Left Review. 146:53–92.
• Postmodernism and Cultural Theories (Chinese: 后现代主义与文化理论; pinyin: Hòuxiàndàizhǔyì yǔ wénhuà lǐlùn). Tr. Tang Xiaobing. Xi'an: Shaanxi Normal University Press. 1987.
• The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971–1986. Vol. 1: Situations of Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1988.
• The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971–1986. Vol. 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1988.
• Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Derry: Field Day, 1988. A collection of three Field Day Pamphlets by Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton and Edward Said.
• Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. London & New York: Verso. 1990.
• Signatures of the Visible. New York & London: Routledge. 1990.
• Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1991.
• The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1992.
• The Seeds of Time. The Wellek Library lectures at the University of California, Irvine. New York: Columbia University Press. 1994.
• Brecht and Method. London & New York: Verso. 1998. Reissued: 2011 (Verso)
• The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. London & New York: Verso. 1998. Reissued: 2009 (Verso)
• The Jameson Reader. Ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell. 2000.
• A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London & New York Verso. 2002.
• Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London & New York: Verso. 2005.
• The Modernist Papers. London & New York Verso. 2007.
• Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism. Ed. Ian Buchanan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2007.
• The Ideologies of Theory. London & New York: Verso. 2009. (One-volume edition, with additional essays)
• Valences of the Dialectic. London & New York: Verso. 2009.
• The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit. London & New York: Verso. 2010.
• Representing 'Capital': A Reading of Volume One. London & New York: Verso. 2011.
• The Antinomies of Realism. London & New York: Verso. 2013.
• The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms. London & New York: Verso. 2015.
• An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army. Ed. Slavoj Žižek. London and New York: Verso. 2016.
• Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality. London and New York: Verso. 2016.
• Allegory and Ideology. London and New York: Verso. 2019.
• The Benjamin Files. London and New York: Verso. 2020.
• Mimesis, Expression, Construction: Fredric Jameson's Seminar on Aesthetic Theory. Repeater. 2024
• Inventions of a Present : The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization. London and New York: Verso. 2024
• The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present. Ed. Carson Welch. London and New York: Verso. 2024

See also

• Dialectic
• Dialectical materialism
• Hegel
• Late capitalism
• Literary realism
• Literary theory
• Marx
• Marxism
• Marxist theorists
• Modernism
• Political consciousness
• Postmodernism
• Psychoanalytic sociology
• Utopia
• Mark Fisher

References

Bibliography

• Grossberg, Lawrence. 2024. On the Way to Theory. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-1-47-802663-1 (hbk). ISBN 978-1-47-803085-0 (pbk). ISBN 978-1-47-805983-7 (ebk).
• Sheehan, Helena. 1998. "Grand narratives then and now: Can we still conceptualise history?" Socialism and Democracy. 12(1):75–87. Routledge. doi:10.1080/08854309808428212.

Further reading

• Ahmad, Aijaz (1992), "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory'", In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso, pp. 95–122
• Anderson, Perry (1998), The Origins of Postmodernity, London: Verso
• Arac, Jonathan (1987), "Frederic Jameson and Marxism", Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 261–279
• Arkaraprasertkul, Non (2009), "On Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Postmodernism, and Architecture", Architectural Theory Review, 14 (1): 79–94, doi:10.1080/13264820902741011
• Balakrishnan, Gopal (November–December 2010), "The coming contradiction", New Left Review, 66
• Bailes, Jon (2020), Consciousness and the Neoliberal Subject: A Theory of Ideology via Marcuse, Jameson and Žižek, Londyn: Routledge, doi:10.4324/9780429321153, ISBN 978-0-429-32115-3
• Buchanan, Ian (2006), Fredric Jameson: Live Theory, London: Continuum International
• Burnham, Clint (1995), The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory, Durham, NC: Duke University Press
• Carp, Alex (March 5, 2014), "On Fredric Jameson", Jacobin
• Davis, Mike (May–June 1985). "Urban renaissance and the spirit of postmodernism". New Left Review. I (151). New Left Review: 106–113.
• Day, Gail (2011), Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory, New York: Columbia University Press
• Demers, Jason; Jameson, Fredric (2023), "The Theory Variations: An Interview with Fredric Jameson", Transatlantica. Revue d'études américaines, 23 (1): 1–10, doi:10.4000/transatlantica.20951, ISSN 1765-2766
• Dowling, William C. (1984), Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
• Eagleton, Terry (1982), "Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style", Diacritics, 12 (3): 14–22, doi:10.2307/464940, JSTOR 464940 (reprinted in T. Eagleton, Against the Grain: Selected Essays 1975–1985, London: Verso, 1986, pp. 65–78).
• Eagleton, Terry (September–October 2009). "Jameson and Form". New Left Review. II (59). New Left Review: 123–137.
• Frow, John (1986), Marxism and Literary History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
• Gatto, Marco (2008), Fredric Jameson: neomarxismo, dialettica e teoria della letteratura, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino
• Greif, Mark (2024), "Glimmers of Totality: Fredric Jameson at Ninety", Harper's Magazine, no. 9, archived from the original on August 19, 2024
• Helmling, Stephen. The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2001.
• Homer, Sean. Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. 1998.
• Hullot-Kentor, Robert. "Suggested Reading: Jameson on Adorno". In Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 220–233.
• Irr, Caren and Ian Buchanan, eds. On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2005.
• Kellner, Douglas, ed. Jameson/Postmodernism/Critique. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press. 1989.
• Kellner, Douglas, and Sean Homer, eds. Fredric Jameson: a Critical Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004.
• Kunkel, Benjamin. "Into the Big Tent". London Review of Books 32.8 (April 22, 2010). 12–16.
• Kouvelakis, Stathis (2007), "Fredric Jameson: An Unslaked Thirst for Totalisation", in Bidet, Jacques; Kouvelakis, Stathis (eds.), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, Leiden: Brill, pp. 697–709, doi:10.1163/ej.9789004145986.i-813.195
• LaCapra, Dominick (1983), "Marxism in the Textual Maelstrom: Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious", Rethinking Intellectual History, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 234–267
• Link, Alex. "The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson's Gothic Plots." Theorising the Gothic. Eds. Jerrold E. Hogle and Andrew Smith. Special issue of Gothic Studies 11.1 (2009): 70–85.
• Millay, Thomas J. "Always Historicize! On Fredric Jameson, the Tea Party, and Theological Pragmatics." The Other Journal 22 (2013).
• Nimis, Steve, ed. (1983), "The Work of Fredric Jameson" (PDF), Critical Exchange, 14: i–123
• Osborne, Peter (1992), "A Marxism for the Postmodern? Jameson's Adorno", New German Critique, 56 (56): 171–192, doi:10.2307/488333, JSTOR 488333
• Roberts, Adam (2000), Fredric Jameson, London: Routledge
• Singh, Iona (2004), "Vermeer, materialism, and the transcendental in art", Rethinking Marxism, 16 (2): 155–171, doi:10.1080/08935690410001676212
• Sprinker, Michael (1987), Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism, Londyn: Verso
• Tally, Robert (2014), Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism, London: Pluto
• Tally, Robert (1996), "Jameson's Project of Cognitive Mapping", in Paulston, Rolland G. (ed.), Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change, New York: Garland, pp. 399–416
• Vázquez-Arroyo, Antonio Y. (2023), "Fredric Jameson: Dialectical Criticism and the Politics of Theory", Polity, 55 (4): 720–744, doi:10.1086/726475
• Weber, Samuel (1983), "Capitalising History: Notes on The Political Unconscious", in Barker, Francis; Hulme, Peter; Iversen, Margaret; Loxley, Diana (eds.), The Politics of Theory, Colchester: University of Essex Press, pp. 248–264
• Wegner, Phillip E. (2014), Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press
• West, Cornel (1982–1983), "Fredric Jameson's Marxist Hermeneutics", Boundary 2, 11 (1–2): 177–200, doi:10.2307/303025, JSTOR 303025
• White, Hayden (1982), "Getting Out of History", Diacritics, 12 (3): 2–13, doi:10.2307/464939, JSTOR 464939 (reprinted as Getting Out of History: Jameson's Redemption of Narrative, in H. White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 142–168)
• Wise, Christopher (1995), The Marxian Hermeneutics of Fredric Jameson, New York: Lang
• Žižek, Slavoj (2011), "With Hegel Beyond Hegel", Criticism, 53 (2): 295–313, doi:10.1353/crt.2011.0011