Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Jameson, Fredric - Richard Gott (review date 26 February 1999)

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Richard Gott (review date 26 February 1999)

SOURCE: “It's Irony, Guv,” in New Statesman, February 26, 1999, pp. 55-7.

[In the following excerpt, Gott discusses Jameson's analysis of postmodernity in The Cultural Turn.]

Everyone now recognises that we live in a postmodern world. In architecture and design, in film and music, in art and fiction, in poetry and literary criticism, even in politics, postmodernity is everywhere on display: cynicism and levity, irony and pastiche, nostalgia coupled with historical amnesia, and decoration replacing substance. So obvious and widespread has the phenomenon become that people use this shorthand word with relaxed ease to describe the world around them.

This was not always so. Writing only ten years ago, the American critic Fredric Jameson noted that “the concept of postmodernism is not widely accepted or even understood today”. Yet so pervasive has been its influence and so rapid its...

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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