At the time of his death, at 90, on Sept. 22, Fredric Jameson was arguably the most prominent Marxist literary critic in the English-speaking world. I

For Fredric Jameson, Marxist Criticism Was a Labor of Love

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2024-09-24 20:00:05

At the time of his death, at 90, on Sept. 22, Fredric Jameson was arguably the most prominent Marxist literary critic in the English-speaking world. In other words, he was a fairly obscure figure: well-known — revered, it’s fair to say — within a specialized sector of an increasingly marginal discipline. I don’t say that to diminish his importance, but rather to make a case for it.

Jameson, hired by Duke with much fanfare in 1985 after teaching at Harvard, Yale and U.C. Santa Cruz, was an academic celebrity, a charismatic scholar in an era of professorial superstardom. Even so, he never sought to become a public intellectual in the manner of some of his American colleagues and French counterparts. You did not expect to see his face on television or find his byline on a newspaper opinion page. While his work was informed by a disciplined and steadfast political point of view — according to the essayist and Stanford professor Mark Greif, he was a Marxist literary critic “in a conspicuously uncompromising way” — it was not pious, dogmatic or ostentatiously topical.

Marxism was, for Jameson, both a mode of analysis and an ethical program. The novels, films and philosophical texts he wrote about — and by implication his own work too — could only be understood within the social and economic structures that produced them. The point of studying them was to figure out how those structures could be dismantled and what might replace them.