Fredric Jameson | Today's AI Wiki

1. Life

Fredric Jameson's life was marked by a deep engagement with intellectual pursuits and a distinguished academic career, which saw him contribute significantly to the fields of literary criticism and Marxist theory.

Fredric Jameson speaking at Fronteiras do Pensamento in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2011.

1.1. Early Life and Education

Fredric Ruff Jameson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 14, 1934. He was the only child of Frank S. Jameson, a New York-born medical doctor with a private practice, and Bernice Ruff, a Michigan-born Barnard College graduate who did not work outside the home. By April 1935, his family had moved to Gloucester City, New Jersey, and by 1949, they resided in the middle-class suburb of Haddon Heights, New Jersey. He graduated from Moorestown Friends School in 1950.

Jameson completed a BA in French with highest honors at Haverford College in 1954, where he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society in his junior year. His professors at Haverford included Wayne Booth, to whom his 2002 work A Singular Modernity is dedicated. After graduation, he briefly traveled to Europe, studying in Aix-en-Provence, Munich, and Berlin. During this period, he encountered new developments in continental philosophy, including the emergence of structuralism. He returned to America the following year to pursue a PhD at Yale University under the guidance of Erich Auerbach. He was awarded his doctorate in 1959 for his dissertation titled The Origins of Sartre's Style.

1.2. Academic Career

Jameson's academic career spanned several prestigious institutions. From 1959 to 1967, he taught French and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He then joined the University of California, San Diego, from 1967 (though by his own account, he arrived in late 1968) to 1976, where he collaborated with Herbert Marcuse. At UC San Diego, he taught courses on Marxist literary criticism, the Frankfurt School, the French novel and poetry, and Sartre.

In 1976, he was hired by Yale University through Paul de Man, and in 1983, he moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1985, Jameson joined Duke University as a Professor of Literature and Professor of Romance Studies. At Duke, he played a pivotal role in establishing the literary studies program and held the William A. Lane Professorship of Comparative Literature, which was renamed the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professorship of Comparative Literature in 2013. In 1985, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

2. Academic Contributions and Major Works

Fredric Jameson's intellectual trajectory was marked by a consistent engagement with critical theory, particularly through a Marxist lens, which evolved into a profound analysis of contemporary culture and its historical underpinnings.

2.1. Early Thought and Influences

Jameson's early intellectual interests were deeply shaped by his doctoral studies under Erich Auerbach at Yale University. Auerbach's philological tradition, which analyzed literary form within social history, proved to be a lasting influence. This was evident in Jameson's 1961 doctoral dissertation, published as Sartre: The Origins of a Style. In this work, Jameson explored the intricate relationship between the style of Sartre's writings and the political and ethical dimensions of his existentialist philosophy, examining the articulation of poetry, history, philology, and philosophy in Sartre's works.

Jameson's dissertation, while drawing on a rich tradition of European cultural analysis, notably diverged from the prevailing Anglo-American academic trends of empiricism and logical positivism in philosophy and linguistics, and New Critical formalism in literary criticism. Despite this divergence, it secured him a position at Harvard University. Although the early work on Sartre only briefly touched upon the Marxist aspects of Sartre's thought, Jameson would return to these elements with greater intensity in the subsequent decade.

2.2. Research into Marxism and Critical Theory

Jameson's deepening interest in Sartre ultimately led him to an intensive study of Marxist literary theory. While Karl Marx was gaining influence in American social science, partly due to European intellectuals who sought refuge in the United States during the Second World War (such as Theodor Adorno), the literary and critical work of Western Marxism remained largely unknown in American academia during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

His shift towards Marxism was also propelled by his growing political connections with the New Left and pacifist movements, alongside the Cuban Revolution, which Jameson saw as a clear sign that "Marxism was alive and well as a collective movement and a culturally productive force." His research increasingly focused on critical theory, engaging with thinkers from and influenced by the Frankfurt School, including Kenneth Burke, György Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser, and Sartre. These theorists viewed cultural criticism as an integral component of Marxist theory. In 1969, Jameson co-founded the Marxist Literary Group with several of his graduate students at the University of California, San Diego.

Unlike the Orthodox Marxist view of ideology, which held that the cultural "superstructure" was completely determined by the economic "base", Western Marxists critically analyzed culture as a historical and social phenomenon intertwined with economic production and distribution or political power relationships. They advocated for studying culture using the Hegelian concept of immanent critique. This theory posits that an adequate description and criticism of a philosophical or cultural text must be conducted using the text's own terms, thereby developing its internal inconsistencies in a manner that facilitates intellectual advancement. Marx himself emphasized immanent critique in his early writings, drawing from Hegel's development of a new form of dialectical thinking that, as Jameson noted, would attempt "to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps."

2.3. Narrative, History, and The Political Unconscious

History became an increasingly central element in Jameson's interpretation of both the reception (consumption) and creation (production) of literary texts. His full commitment to Hegelian-Marxist philosophy was unequivocally marked by the publication of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act in 1981, famously opening with the slogan "always historicize." The book's primary focus is not the literary text itself, but rather the interpretive frameworks through which it is constructed, emerging as a foundational text for understanding literary narratives.

The core argument of The Political Unconscious emphasized history as the "ultimate horizon" for literary and cultural analysis. It integrated concepts from the structuralist tradition and Raymond Williams's work in cultural studies, connecting them to a broadly Marxist perspective that centered on labor (whether manual or intellectual) as the focal point of analysis. Jameson's interpretations explored both the explicit formal and thematic choices made by the writer, as well as the unconscious framework that guided these choices. Artistic decisions typically viewed in purely aesthetic terms were recontextualized within historical literary practices and norms, aiming to systematically catalog the constraints they imposed on the artist as an individual creative subject. To further this meta-commentary, Jameson introduced the concept of the ideologeme, which he defined as "the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes," representing the smallest legible remnant of the ongoing, real-life struggles 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 popularized by Julia Kristeva, who 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 assertion of history as the sole pertinent factor in this analysis, deriving the categories governing artistic production from their historical framework, was coupled with a bold theoretical claim. The book contended that Marxian literary criticism, anchored in the notion of an artistic mode of production, constituted the most inclusive and comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding literature. According to Vincent B. Leitch, the publication of The Political Unconscious established Jameson as "the leading Marxist literary critic in America."

2.4. Analysis of Postmodernism and Late Capitalism

Fredric Jameson's most impactful and widely recognized contribution lies in his conceptualization and trenchant analysis of postmodernism, which he famously linked to the cultural logic of late capitalism.

2.4.1. Background and Context

Jameson's engagement with postmodernism gained widespread recognition, and at the time of his death in 2024, he was generally considered the preeminent critic of this cultural phenomenon. His central contention was that postmodernism functions as the cultural expression of the contemporary period of late capitalism. He argued that postmodernism represents a vast cultural expansion into an economy driven by spectacle and style, rather than by the traditional production of goods.

Jameson developed this analytical framework during a period when art historians were actively debating whether the contemporary era had moved beyond modern art to a "postmodern" phase. He entered this debate in 1984 with his influential article, "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," first published in the journal New Left Review. He later expanded this article into a book, published in 1991, which became a landmark publication in its field and remains Duke University Press's all-time bestseller as of 2024.

2.4.2. Core Argument

Following Ernest Mandel's periodization in his book Late Capitalism (1975), Jameson argued for three fundamental moments in capitalism-market capitalism, the monopoly stage (or imperialism), and multinational (or late) capitalism-each marking a dialectical expansion. To these forms of society, he posited corresponding cultural forms: realism, modernism, and postmodernism. In Jameson's analysis, the postmodern era's tendency to merge all forms of discourse into an undifferentiated whole was a direct consequence of the cultural sphere's colonization by a newly organized corporate capitalism. This cultural sphere, which had maintained at least partial autonomy during the preceding modernist era, was now subsumed.

Drawing on Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of the culture industry, Jameson elaborated on this phenomenon through his critical discussions of architecture, film, narrative, and visual arts, as well as in his more purely philosophical works. For Jameson, postmodernism, driven by capitalism and manifesting as mass culture, permeates every aspect of daily life. He viewed the postmodern "skepticism of metanarratives" as stemming from the intellectual labor conditions imposed by late capitalist modes of production, characterizing it as a distinct "mode of experience."

2.4.3. Key Concepts: Pastiche and Crisis in Historicity

Two of Jameson's most widely cited concepts from Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism are the characterization of postmodernity by "pastiche" and a "crisis in historicity". Given that postmodernism, as he argued, signifies a vast cultural expansion into an economy of spectacle and style rather than the production of goods, Jameson contended that parody (which implies a moral judgment or comparison with societal norms) was supplanted by pastiche (a form of collage or juxtaposition lacking normative grounding). While modernism frequently "quotes" from different cultures and historical periods, Jameson argued that postmodern cultural texts indiscriminately cannibalize these elements, erasing any sense of critical or historical distance, resulting in pure pastiche.

Relatedly, Jameson asserted that the postmodern era suffers from a profound crisis in historicity. He observed that "there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the [...] 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, and he explicitly rejected any moralistic opposition to postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon. Instead, he insisted upon a Hegelian immanent critique that would "think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together." However, his initial refusal to simply dismiss postmodernism was sometimes misinterpreted by some Marxist intellectuals as an implicit endorsement of postmodern views.

2.5. Later Work and Projects

Several of Jameson's later works, including Postmodernism, are integral parts of what he termed a "sequence" and "project" titled The Poetics of Social Forms. This ambitious project aims to provide a comprehensive history of aesthetic forms while simultaneously demonstrating how this history can be read in conjunction with a history of social and economic formations. The project is structured into six volumes comprising seven publications grouped into three subdivisions:

IA. Categories of the Narrative-Historical (unpublished at the time of his death)
IB. Allegory and Ideology (2019)
IIA. The Antinomies of Realism (2013), which won the 2014 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.
IIB1. A Singular Modernity (2002)
IIB2. The Modernist Papers (2007), intended to accompany A Singular Modernity as a sourcebook.
IIC. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
III. Archaeologies of the Future (2005), a study of utopia and science fiction, which was launched at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Alongside The Poetics of Social Forms, Jameson published three significant studies focused on dialectical theory:

Valences of the Dialectic (2009), which includes his critical responses to contemporary theorists such as Slavoj Žižek and Gilles Deleuze.
The Hegel Variations (2010), a detailed commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (2011), an in-depth analysis of Marx's Das Kapital.

An overview of Jameson's extensive body of work, titled Fredric Jameson: Live Theory by Ian Buchanan, was published in 2007.

3. Personal Life

Fredric Jameson was married twice, first to Janet Jameson, and subsequently to Susan Willis. Through these two marriages, he had two sons and five daughters.

4. Death

Fredric Jameson passed away at his home in Killingworth, Connecticut, on September 22, 2024, at the age of 90.

5. Recognition, Influence, and Legacy

Fredric Jameson's profound insights and extensive body of work garnered him significant recognition and left an indelible mark on academia, particularly in the fields of literary criticism, cultural studies, and Marxist theory.

5.1. Awards and Honors

The Modern Language Association (MLA) consistently recognized Jameson's scholarly achievements throughout his career. In 1971, he was awarded the MLA's William Riley Parker Prize. Twenty years later, in 1991, he received the prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize for his landmark publication, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. This work has remained a foundational text in its field since its publication. The MLA further honored Jameson in 2012 with its Lifetime Achievement Award, acknowledging his enduring contributions to scholarship.

In 2008, Jameson was awarded the annual Holberg International Memorial Prize in recognition of his career-long research into the intricate relationship between social formations and cultural forms. The prize, valued at 4.60 M NOK (approximately 648.00 K USD at the time), was presented to him by Tora Aasland, the Norwegian Minister of Education and Research, in Bergen, Norway, on November 26, 2008.

In 2009, the North American Society for Utopian Studies presented Jameson with the Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award. He was specifically credited for his significant role in introducing to an English-speaking audience the rich theoretical frameworks of Utopia found in German critical theory, particularly in the works of Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and most notably, Ernst Bloch. It was also highlighted that "the question of Utopia is central to all of Jameson's work."

5.2. Influence in China

Jameson exerted a significant influence on the theorization of postmodernism in China. In mid-1985, at the onset of the "cultural fever" (a period in Chinese intellectual history from early 1985 to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre characterized by intense interest in Western critical theory, literary theory, and related disciplines), Jameson delivered lectures on postmodernism at Peking University and the newly established Shenzhen University. His ideas presented at Peking University notably impacted students such as Zhang Yiwu and Zhang Xudong, whose subsequent work contributed significantly to the analysis of postmodernity in China.

In 1987, Jameson published a book titled Postmodernism and Cultural Theories (后现代主义与文化理论_{Hòuxiàndàizhǔyì yǔ wénhuà lǐlùn}^Chinese), translated into Chinese by Tang Xiaobing. Although the Chinese intelligentsia's full engagement with postmodernism did not truly begin until the 1990s, Postmodernism and Cultural Theories became a pivotal text in this intellectual discourse. Scholar Wang Ning emphasized that its influence on Chinese thinkers could not be overstated. Its popularity was partly due to its accessible style, allowing it to be used for both praise and criticism of the Chinese manifestation of postmodernity. However, some interpretations, such as that by Wang Chaohua, argued that Jameson's work was often fundamentally misread to support mass culture, abandoning its "caustic edge" that described postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism."

This debate over postmodernism, partly fueled by Jameson's work, reached its peak intensity from 1994 to 1997, involving Chinese intellectuals both within and outside mainland China. Key contributions came from Zhao Yiheng in London, Xu Ben in the United States, and Zhang Xudong, also in the United States, who had pursued doctoral studies under Jameson at Duke University.

5.3. Overall Legacy

Fredric Jameson's intellectual legacy is immense and far-reaching. In 2011, Rey Chow, then chair of Duke University's literature program, remarked on the occasion of his 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.'s 2024 review for Jacobin of Jameson's work Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization described him as being "at the height of his powers, carving out his novel alternative" and asserted 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 hailed Jameson as an "intellectual giant" whose "enduring legacy has inspired generations of thinkers, activists and scholars." They lauded his "militant commitment to a materialist reading of moments of struggle and revolt, utopia and liberation in cultural texts." Another memorial essay in The Nation observed that Jameson emerged as a figure who "not only amassed one of the most impressive bodies of work within his field but who also was, fundamentally, someone who believed in criticism as a discourse, between teacher and pupil, between the work and the public."

Jameson's influence extended to Japanese intellectual discourse as well. He contributed a preface to Karatani Kōjin's influential work, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, demonstrating his engagement with global literary theory. He is also known for his critiques of specific art movements like "photo-realism" and "critical regionalism," which he discussed in essays such as "Towards a Libidinal Economy of Three Modern Painters" (1979).

6. Publications

Fredric Jameson's extensive bibliography reflects his prolific and influential career in literary criticism, philosophy, and Marxist theory.

6.1. Books

Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Yale University Press, 1961.
Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, Princeton University Press, 1971.
The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, Princeton University Press, 1972.
Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, University of California Press, 1979. Reissued: Verso, 2008.
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Cornell University Press, 1981.
Postmodernism and Cultural Theories (后现代主义与文化理论_{Hòuxiàndàizhǔyì yǔ wénhuà lǐlùn}^Chinese). Tr. Tang Xiaobing. Xi'an: Shaanxi Normal University Press. 1987.
The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971-1986. Vol. 1: Situations of Theory, University of Minnesota Press, 1988. (anthology)
The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971-1986. Vol. 2: The Syntax of History, University of Minnesota Press, 1988. (anthology)
Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. (with Terry Eagleton and Edward Said) Derry: Field Day, 1988.
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.
Theory of Culture, Rikkyo University, 1994. (Based on lectures given at Rikkyo University in May-June 1993)
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.
The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, London & New York: Verso, 1998. Reissued: 2009. (anthology)
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. (semi-anthology)
The Modernist Papers, London & New York Verso, 2007.
Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism. Ed. Ian Buchanan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2007. (Collection of nine interviews from 1982-1995 and a recent interview)
The Ideologies of Theory, London & New York: Verso, 2009. (altered one-volume re-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 Commentary on 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. Ed. Octavian Esanu. London: 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.

6.2. Selected Articles

"Walter Benjamin, or Nostalgia", Salmagundi, 10-11, 1969-1970, pp. 52-68.
"The Great American Hunter, or, Ideological Content in the Novel", College English, 34 (2), 1972, pp. 180-197.
"The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber", New German Critique, 1, 1973, pp. 52-89.
"On Goffman's Frame Analysis", Theory and Society, 3 (1), 1976, pp. 119-133.
"Towards a Libidinal Economy of Three Modern Painters", Social Text, 1979.
"Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", New Left Review, I/146, 1984, pp. 53-92.
"Cognitive Mapping", in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 347-357.
"The Dialectics of Disaster", South Atlantic Quarterly, 101 (2), 2002, pp. 297-304.
"Politics of Utopia", New Left Review, II/25, 2004, pp. 35-56.
"War and Representation", PMLA, 124 (5), 2009, pp. 1532-1547.
"Badiou and the French Tradition", New Left Review, II/102, 2016, pp. 99-117.

6.3. Secondary Literature

Ahmad, Aijaz. "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory'". In In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso, 1992, pp. 95-122.
Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity, London: Verso, 1998.
Arac, Jonathan. "Frederic Jameson and Marxism". In Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, pp. 261-279.
Arkaraprasertkul, Non. "On Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Postmodernism, and Architecture", Architectural Theory Review, 14 (1), 2009, pp. 79-94.
Bailes, Jon. Consciousness and the Neoliberal Subject: A Theory of Ideology via Marcuse, Jameson and Žižek, London: Routledge, 2020.
Boer, Roland. "Religion and Utopia in Fredric Jameson", Utopian Studies, 19 (2), 2008, pp. 285-312.
Buchanan, Ian. Fredric Jameson: Live Theory, London: Continuum International, 2006.
Burnham, Clint. The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
Carter, Stephen D. "The Dialectic of War and Utopia: Systemic Closure and Embattled Social Life in the Work of Fredric Jameson", Criticism, 58 (2), 2016, pp. 177-204.
Davis, Mike. "Urban renaissance and the spirit of postmodernism", New Left Review, I/151, May-June 1985, pp. 106-113.
Day, Gail. Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Demers, Jason and Fredric Jameson. "The Theory Variations: An Interview with Fredric Jameson", Transatlantica. Revue d'études américaines, 23 (1), 2023, pp. 1-10.
Dowling, William C. Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Eagleton, Terry. "Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style", Diacritics, 12 (3), 1982, pp. 14-22.
Eagleton, Terry. "Jameson and Form", New Left Review, II/59, September-October 2009, pp. 123-137.
Frow, John. Marxism and Literary History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Gatto, Marco. Fredric Jameson: neomarxismo, dialettica e teoria della letteratura, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2008.
Grossberg, Lawrence. On the Way to Theory, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 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. pp. 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.
Kouvelakis, Stathis. "Fredric Jameson: An Unslaked Thirst for Totalisation". In Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, ed. Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis, Leiden: Brill, 2007, pp. 697-709.
Kunkel, Benjamin. "Into the Big Tent". London Review of Books 32.8 (April 22, 2010). pp. 12-16.
LaCapra, Dominick. "Marxism in the Textual Maelstrom: Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious". In Rethinking Intellectual History, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983, pp. 234-267.
Leitch, Vincent B. American Literary Criticism since the 1930s, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2010.
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): pp. 70-85.
Millay, Thomas J. "Always Historicize! On Fredric Jameson, the Tea Party, and Theological Pragmatics." The Other Journal 22 (2013).
Mohanty, Satya P. Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Nimis, Steve, ed. "The Work of Fredric Jameson", Critical Exchange, 14, 1983, pp. i-123.
Osborne, Peter. "A Marxism for the Postmodern? Jameson's Adorno", New German Critique, 56, 1992, pp. 171-192.
Powell, Jason. Jacques Derrida: A Biography, London: Continuum International, 2006.
Roberts, Adam. Fredric Jameson, London: Routledge, 2000.
Sheehan, Helena. "Grand narratives then and now: Can we still conceptualise history?", Socialism and Democracy, 12 (1), 1998, pp. 75-87.
Simons, Jon. "Postmodern paranoia? Pynchon and Jameson", Paragraph, 23 (2), 2000, pp. 207-221.
Singh, Iona. "Vermeer, materialism, and the transcendental in art", Rethinking Marxism, 16 (2), 2004, pp. 155-171.
Sprinker, Michael. Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism, Londyn: Verso, 1987.
Tally, Robert. Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism, London: Pluto, 2014.
Tally, Robert. "Jameson's Project of Cognitive Mapping". In Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change, ed. Rolland G. Paulston, New York: Garland, 1996, pp. 399-416.
Vázquez-Arroyo, Antonio Y. "Fredric Jameson: Dialectical Criticism and the Politics of Theory", Polity, 55 (4), 2023, pp. 720-744.
Weber, Samuel. "Capitalising History: Notes on The Political Unconscious". In The Politics of Theory, ed. Francis Barker et al., Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1983, pp. 248-264.
Wegner, Phillip E. Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014.
West, Cornel. "Fredric Jameson's Marxist Hermeneutics", Boundary 2, 11 (1-2), 1982-1983, pp. 177-200.
White, Hayden. "Getting Out of History", Diacritics, 12 (3), 1982, pp. 2-13.
Wise, Christopher. The Marxian Hermeneutics of Fredric Jameson, New York: Lang, 1995.
Žižek, Slavoj. "With Hegel Beyond Hegel", Criticism, 53 (2), 2011, pp. 295-313.