Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Jameson, Fredric - David Bromwich (review date 19 February 1990)

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David Bromwich (review date 19 February 1990)

SOURCE: “The Professor of Necessity,” in The New Republic, February 19, 1990, pp. 34-9.

[In the following review of The Ideologies of Theory, Bromwich finds contradictions in Jameson's “master narrative” concept and criticizes his unsubstantiated critical readings and “curiously messianic” exaltation of postmodernism.]

“I must create a system,” said Blake, “or be enslaved by another man’s.” The vanguard slogans of the human sciences today have a rather different sound. To be ensnared by any number of systems, in succession or all at once: that is the favored stance.

Fredric Jameson, who has published studies of Sartre and Wyndham Lewis, came to be widely known in the early 1970s, with two books of a different kind. Marxism and Form surveyed a tradition of critical and utopian speculation generally associated with Adorno and the theorists of the...

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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