Fredric Jameson takes on the allegorical form
Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University and recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, The Cultural Turn, and Representing Capital.
Allegory and Ideology charges an antique form with renewed
political urgency. At its heart is the melancholy conviction that
we can never directly lay hold of history.
*Marx & Philosophy Review of Books*
Throughout this challenging, boundary-crossing new tome, we are
repeatedly given such experiences of the intersection of the most
minute details of a text and the grandest movements of history,
making for a kind of head-spinning and euphoric journey. Yet this
bewildering back-and-forth is in line, after all, with what the
experience of the dialectic-with its unexpected connections between
previously unrelated social strata-is supposed to feel like in the
first place. In that, Jameson, as a dialectician, has once again
achieved his aim.
*Critical Inquiry*
The world, it seems, keeps trying to catch up to Jameson, whose
talent for dialectical unification still shines forth with
radioactive power. After you've read him, it's impossible to unsee
what he's shown you: his phenomenology of everyday life reveals the
hidden architecture of the capitalist mode of produciton with the
aesthetic aptitude of a modern novelist.
*Full Stop*
Allegory, for Jameson, is less a means of overriding difference
than a means of preserving it. To look at history and find a great
deal of allegory, as this book does, is to find in history, amidst
all the destruction, an impulse to preserve and a large quantity of
successful preservation.
*The Baffler*
Allegory and Ideology involves its readers in the process of
intellectual discovery. We may learn from the author of Allegory
and Ideology the delight in moving ideas around, forcing them to
change the company they keep, in order to see what happens.
Jameson's distinctive feature seems to be the way in which his
periods rework and transform all objects of analysis by placing
them in an ever-shifting syntactical architecture. His intense
account of Auerbach's Dante can easily be read as a declaration of
Jameson's own poetics. Nothing has a meaning, in Allegory and
Ideology, if not through a complex relation to everything else.
*New Left Review*
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