Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Jameson, Fredric - Barry Schwabsky (review date 29 May 1995)

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Barry Schwabsky (review date 29 May 1995)

SOURCE: “Shut Up and Listen,” in The Nation, May 29, 1995, pp. 762-4.

[In the following review of The Seeds of Time, Schwabsky commends Jameson's intellectual range and subject, but faults his writing as condescending and overly evasive.]

Fredric Jameson is indeed, as both Terry Eagleton and Hal Foster call him on the back of his new book’s jacket, America’s foremost Marxist critic, and he may well be too, as the publisher’s flap copy has it, this country’s leading Marxist theorist. But of what is he a critic, and what is his theory? Those are hard questions to answer, and The Seeds of Time does not make it any easier. Although he is a professor of comparative literature, only the second of the book’s three chapters is on a literary subject—it is an extended reading of Andrei Platonov’s novel Chevengur (1927–28)—while the first, treating two pairs of...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Denis Donoghue (review date 16 November 1973)
   2. Jonathan Culler (review date July 1974)
   3. Brian J. Murray (review date Summer 1980)
   4. James Naremore (review date Fall 1980)
   5. Betty Abel (review date June 1981)
   6. David Punter (review date Fall 1981)
   7. Michael Wilding (review date October 1982)
   8. Patrick Parrinder (review date January 1985)
   9. Daniel T. O'Hara (review date Fall-Winter 1988-1989)
   10. David Bromwich (review date 19 February 1990)
   11. Michael Ferber (review date 15 October 1990)
   12. Stephen Howe (review date 15 March 1991)
   13. Reed Way Dasenbrock (review date Spring 1991)
   14. Michael Rosen (review date 24 May 1991)
   15. Reed Way Dasenbrock (review date Winter 1992)
   16. Susan E. Hawkins (review date Winter 1992)
   17. K. M. Newton (review date April 1992)
   18. Ralph Flores (review date Spring 1993)
   19. Stephen Regan (review date January 1994)
   20. Wendy Kozol (review date June 1994)
   21. Anders Stephanson (review date January 1995)
   22. Barry Schwabsky (review date 29 May 1995)
   23. Linda Hutcheon (review date Winter 1996)
   24. Geoffrey Galt Harpham (review date Summer 1996)
   25. Barbara Foley (review date February 1997)
   26. Richard Gott (review date 26 February 1999)
   27. Volker Gransow and Pia Kleber (review date Summer 1999)
   28. Peter Berger (review date 20 August 1999)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright