Kunkel, Benjamin. "Into the Big Tent." LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS April 22, 2010.

Jameson, Frederic. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 2009. Over the last quarter-century, Jameson has been at once the timeliest and most untimely of American critics and writers. Not only did he develop interests in film, science fiction, or the work of Walter Benjamin, say, earlier than most of his colleagues in the humanities, he was also a pioneer of that enlargement of literary criticism (Jameson received a PhD in French literature from Yale in 1959) into all-purpose theory which made the discussion of all these things in the same breath established academic practice. More than this, he succeeded better than anyone else at defining the term, ‘postmodernism’, that sought to catch the historical specificity of the present age. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n08/benjamin-kunkel/into-the-big-tent.