Jameson, Fredric - Geoffrey Galt Harpham (review date Summer 1996)

Geoffrey Galt Harpham (review date Summer 1996)

SOURCE: “Late Jameson,” in Salmagundi, No. 111, Summer, 1996, pp. 213-32.

[In the following review, Harpham provides an overview of Jameson's writings and intellectual development and offers an unfavorable assessment of The Seeds of Time, which he views as a “softening” and capitulation of Jameson's Marxism for an ineffectual postmodern perspective.]

Forever, it seems, Fredric Jameson has been described as “America’s leading Marxist critic.” Since the appearance of the challenging and sternly magisterial Marxism and Form in 1971, nobody else has had a shred of a claim to this title, certainly not now, when to be the foremost Marxist might seem a bit like being the leading manufacturer of typewriters, turntables, or four-wheel roller skates. The stature of Jameson, a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, has survived the dissolution...

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