
By Fredric Jameson
For greater than thirty years, Fredric Jameson has been probably the most efficient, wide-ranging, and distinct literary theorists within the usa and the Anglophone global. Marxism and shape supplied a pioneering account of the paintings of the most important eu Marxist theorists--T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Jean-Paul Sartre--work that used to be, on the time, principally missed within the English-speaking global. via penetrating readings of every theorist, Jameson built a severe mode of engagement that has had large in.uence. He supplied a framework for reading the relationship among artwork and the old situations of its making--in specific, how cultural artifacts distort, repress, or remodel their conditions in the course of the abstractions of aesthetic shape.
Jameson's presentation of the severe considered this Hegelian Marxism supplied a stark replacement to the Anglo-American culture of empiricism and humanism. it should later offer a compelling replacement to poststructuralism and deconstruction as they turned dominant methodologies in aesthetic criticism.
One 12 months after Marxism and shape, Princeton released Jameson's The Prison-House of Language (1972), which supplied a radical ancient and philosophical description of formalism and structuralism. either books stay principal to Jameson's major highbrow legacy: describing and lengthening a convention of Western Marxism in cultural conception and literary interpretation.