Page 193 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

modernist to postmodernist art, functioned historically as key
early warning signals as to how these two processes would even-
tually combine to threaten what most people in the West had
previously understood not only by ‘culture’, but also by ‘society’.
Which might help to explain why the most persuasive and
influential account to date of the deep structural roots of post-
modernism should have come, not from sociology at all, but from
literary and cultural studies, in the shape of Fredric Jameson,
Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. This
has been so, we suspect, precisely because the sociologists had
tended to underestimate the more general social significance of
the specifically aesthetic aspects of post-modernism.

MAPPING POSTMODERNISM: JAMESON

Jameson is a key figure in contemporary cultural theory, the most
important exponent of North American critical theory after
Marcuse. Indeed, a good case could be made for his inclusion in
our third chapter, alongside Habermas and Bourdieu. But
despite a long and distinguished career as literary theorist and
critic, Jameson is still best known for his theory of postmod-
ernism. His various essays on the subject have become standard
references (Jameson, 1984; Jameson, 1985; Jameson, 1988a;
Jameson, 1994; Jameson, 1998); and his full-length study, Post-
modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, is for many the
locus classicus of the postmodern debate. As Anderson rightly
observes, Jameson’s work has ‘set the terms of subsequent debate’
(Anderson, 1998, p. 78).

Jameson and cultural theory
Jameson’s earliest intellectual interests were in existentialism and
contemporary French literature, but he was attracted to the New
Left during the 1960s and thence to German critical theory. His
initial reputation as a critic was established by two books
published in the early 1970s, both concerned at least as much with
French as with German theory (Jameson, 1971; Jameson, 1972).

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