Pub: Frederic Jameson, REPRESENTING CAPITAL.

Jameson, Frederic.  Representing Capital: a Reading of Volume One.  London: Verso, 2010.

A radical rereading of Marx’s central work by the prolific cultural theorist and philosopher. Representing Capital, Fredric Jameson’s first book-length engagement with Marx’s magnum opus, is a unique work of scholarship that records the progression of Marx’s thought as if it were a musical score. The textual landscape that emerges is the setting for paradoxes and contradictions that struggle toward resolution, giving rise to new antinomies and a new forward movement. These immense segments overlap each other to combine and develop on new levels in the same way that capital itself does, stumbling against obstacles that it overcomes by progressive expansions, which are in themselves so many leaps into the unknown.

Marx’s fundamental concepts are not presented philosophically, or in social-scientific terms, but rather as a series of figures produced by the development of the text. Jameson grasps Marx’s work as a representational problem and an experiment in constructing the figure or model of the inexpressible phenomenon that is capital.
 
For more information, visit: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844674541/ref=pe_5050_17058000_snp_explore.

Pub: Frederic Jameson, THE HEGEL VARIATIONS.

Jameson, Frederic. The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of the Spirit. London: Verso, 2010.

In this major new study, the philosopher and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson offers a new reading of Hegel’s foundational text Phenomenology of Spirit. In contrast to those who see the Phenomenology as a closed system ending with Absolute Spirit, Jameson’s reading presents an open work in which Hegel has not yet reconstituted himself in terms of a systematic philosophy (Hegelianism) and in which the moments of the dialectic and its levels have not yet been formalized. Hegel’s text executes a dazzling variety of changes on conceptual relationships, in terms with are never allowed to freeze over and become reified in purely philosophical named concepts. The ending, on the aftermath of the French Revolution, is interpreted by Jameson, contra Fukuyama’s “end of history,” as a provisional stalemate between the political and the social, which is here extrapolated to our own time.

Further information may be found here: http://www.versobooks.com/books/495-the-hegel-variations.

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.

Moran, Caitlin. "Duke U. Professor Receives $900,000 Holberg Prize." CHRONICLE November 26, 2008.

Fredric R. Jameson, a professor of literature at Duke University, was awarded the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize at a ceremony in Norway earlier today. The prize, established in 2003 by the Norwegian Parliament and worth about $900,000 this year, is awarded annually to an outstanding scholar in the arts and humanities, the social sciences, theology, or law. Mr. Jameson is known for developing a theoretical framework capable of mapping the relations between aesthetic form and social context. He has written a number of books, including Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). He was recognized by the Ludvig Holberg Memorial Fund for his contributions to literary and cultural studies. Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/news/article/5569/duke-u-professor-receives-900000-holberg-prize.

Bulson, Eric. "THE MODERNIST PAPERS by Fredric Jameson." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT July 27, 2008.

Jameson, Frederic. The Modernist Papers. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Considering the impact of works like The Political Unconscious (1981) and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson hardly needs an apologist for his style or substance. The publications of his articles and books are intellectual events, and he has that unique power to change the terms of the discussion. His writing is unapologetically difficult and resists quick and easy consumption. And that is precisely the point: Jameson's densely packed sentences with their asides, corrections and elaborations have the effect of slowing readers down and making them think. Reading Jameson makes you aware of the fact that if sentences are, strictly speaking, linear, then thought, the motor behind them, is not. He has made a career out of writing what he calls "dialectical sentences." And as he explains elsewhere in a discussion of Adorno and Hegel, you can't think dialectically without writing dialectically. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.powells.com/review/2008_07_27.

Cevasco, Maria Elisa. "Review of Frederic Jameson's ARCHAEOLOGIES OF THE FUTURE." SITUATIONS 2.1 (2007)

THE LATEST BOOK by Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia, is more than a powerful intervention on the studies of a somewhat ignored literary genre. It is a statement on the function of Utopia in the present; and as such, it acquires great political significance for those of us on the Left who are in search for, to quote the name of this journal, a project for the radical imagination in our dire times. . . . The rest is here: http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/situations/article/view/284/211.