Elsewhere and Otherwise Toscano, Alberto
Historical materialism : research in critical Marxist theory,
03/2021, Letnik:
29, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Abstract
This text introduces the symposium on Fredric Jameson's Allegory and Ideology (2019), the second volume in his six-part The Poetics of Social Forms. It frames the debate with a brief ...exploration of some of the figures and problems of allegory that appear across Jameson's œuvre, and surveys some of the Marxist conceptualisations of allegory that have shaped Jameson's approach, as it straddles allegories of the commodity and allegories of utopia. The musical investigation of the nexus of allegory and affect, and the presentation of political allegory as primarily concerned with the disjunction between (national and international) levels are also touched upon as salient dimensions of Jameson's theorising.
Everything for Me Turns into Allegor Pedullà, Gabriele
Historical materialism : research in critical Marxist theory,
03/2021, Letnik:
29, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
While being an important tile of Jameson's whole theoretical project, Allegory and Ideology leaves some key questions not fully answered. Briefly put, these questions concern the meanings and limits ...of allegory; the unstable relationship between allegory and allegoresis in the Western cultural tradition; and the special place allegory plays or could play in postmodern culture. Solving these problems – in the footsteps of Jameson's magisterial inquiry – will be crucial especially for Marxist critics.
This essay uses the work the easiness and the loneliness (2013) by the Danish author Asta Olivia Nordenhof to examine the relationship between utopian imaginings and representations of everyday life. ...It also attempts to develop an alternative to the American literary theorist Fredric Jameson's influential theories on the form and function of utopian writing. The context for Jameson's theory of utopia is a diagnosis of our present characterised by our inability to conceive of any alternative; for Jameson, the principal function of utopian writing is its capacity to open the future as a site of alterity. Arguing that the last decade has seen our historical moment theorised as one incapable of sustaining itself, rather than characterised by the impossibility of imagining the future, the essay uses, among others, the French philosopher Miguel Abensour to articulate how the connection between utopia and the everyday might foster a new and more timely understanding of utopia.
Meditations on Last Philosophy Galloway, Alexander R.
The South Atlantic quarterly,
10/2020, Letnik:
119, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In his 1981 book, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Fredric Jameson elaborated an influential position on ideology and critique. Jameson stressed the priority of ...political interpretation, arguing that “the political interpretation of literary texts … is the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.” After nearly forty years, we return to this text, situating it within Jameson’s long career, in order to explore form, figuration, and utopia. Does Jameson provide a series of meditations on last philosophy?
In his essay 'An American Utopia' (2016) Fredric Jameson advances a reflexive usage of the manifesto genre. Rather than simply announcing a new political agenda, Jameson uses rhetoric familiar from ...twentieth-century socialism to deliberately elicit a negative response from his readers. Using his writing to provoke and then point to a widespread aversion to group membership, Jameson situates himself in the aftermath of so many failed twentieth-century revolutionary traditions, and demonstrates, through his textual experiment, the coercive workings of an alternative strategy. In a play of manifestation, the manifesto manifests a reaction that it harnesses to illustrate its point.
Rather than focusing on the universal army itself, I am interested in Jameson's reflexive rhetorical strategy, a game of stimuli-and-response that itself has an artistic and political genealogy. From this perspective 'An American Utopia' is less like The Communist Manifesto, and rather more like Wyndham Lewis's 1914 'Vorticist Manifesto', a modernist precursor both to Jameson's reflexive usage of the genre and its positing of a widespread, violent anti-sociality. I use this comparison between Jameson and Lewis as a vantage point from which some of the problems with Jameson's innovative strategy can more clearly be discerned.
Thus, the palimpsest tenor of the novel as an attempt to rewrite and rethink the machinations of capitalism in the early frontiers has provided Doctorow with an alternative perspective according to ...which he can appeal to a liminal position in treating the idea of capitalism in the frontier community of Welcome to Hard Times. The novel, as a consequence, advocates what Raymond Federman calls "literature of replenishment" (5-33). That is, Welcome to Hard Times indicates that the conventional fictional forms of perception and world-knowing have expired; hence, it builds on those forms to introduce an alternative fiction, contributing to securing the mediatory position of a storyteller in appraising the contemporary phenomena lensed through a re-thought past. That being the case, Doctorow in the novel pinpoints the recurring periods of prosperity and failure in a capitalist system where Blue's narration oscillates between mentions of breakdown, as in the beginning as well as the ending sections, and also instances of success in the reconstruction process. On than account, Doctorow's approach to the cause of capitalism verges into the critical reading proposed by Greenblatt which occupies the more dynamic position between Jameson and Lyotard.
This article examines the temporality of recent science fiction films, specifically the ways in which architectural histories are used to imagine and characterise dystopias of the future. Drawing on ...the writing of Fredric Jameson and particularly on François Hartog's analysis of 'presentism' in historical discourse, the article proposes that the dystopias shown in many recent science fiction films provide visions of the future which have been decoupled from modernist notions of historical progress. This argument is developed through analysis of the built environments of Brazil (1985) and the Hunger Games series (2012-15). In the former, historicising and modernist architecture are combined to create a dysfunctional, highly bureaucratic dystopia from which escape is impossible. In the latter films, monumental classical forms are the dominant architectural element in a dystopia marked by excessive state violence and surveillance. The postmodern housing project Les Espaces d'Abraxas, designed by Ricardo Bofill, features in both Brazil and the final Hunger Games film, providing common ground for their repudiation of utopian modernist design. The strong presence of architectures from the past in science fiction films is thus more than pastiche; instead, it establishes a temporality in which aspects of the past continue to haunt and encroach on present-day notions of the future.
This essay returns to Edward Said's juxtaposition of secular and religious criticism in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) to ask what benefits, if any, religious criticism might offer to the ...study of literature and culture in the twenty first century. Secular and religious, in Said's catachrestic usage, do not describe specific traditions or historical structures of feeling or any particular set of orthodoxies; rather, they describe distinct thinking practices. The key difference is that religious criticism, in practice, stands on an appeal to some set of foundational principles, while secular criticism does not make any such stand. Looking at examples of criticism with religious valences in the works of Fredric Jameson and Hortense Spillers, the essay argues that religious criticism's inherent commitment to collectivity and morality place it in necessary dialectical tension with secular criticism and thus render it integral to the work of critique as practiced by scholars of literature and culture today.
Abstract
This piece makes a comment on the usefulness of allegory as a mode of reading, by way of an examination of the representation of nationalism in Jameson and in Antonio Candido.
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