Contemporary Literary Criticism | Jameson, Fredric - Betty Abel (review date June 1981)

Betty Abel (review date June 1981)

SOURCE: “A Marxist Literary Map,” in Contemporary Review, Vol. 238, No. 1385, June, 1981, pp. 331-2.

[In the following review, Abel provides a summary of Jameson's analysis in The Political Unconscious.]

In The Political Unconscious, subtitled ‘Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act’, Frederick Jameson provides a comprehensive introduction to the method and practice of Marxist literary criticism. Where all intellectual activity is viewed as historically situated and class-based, literary analysis is essentially a social science, drawing much of its terminology from the other social sciences, sometimes directly but more often by analogy. Thus, the classical Freudian model of the unconscious mind is the exemplar for Dr. Jameson’s proposal of a ‘political unconscious’: no neo-Freudian clinical suggestion is implied in which a moment of ‘cure’ might be possible, a moment when the...

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