Readers not yet familiar with Fredric Jameson’s corpus will find this collection of his theoretical essays a useful introduction to the major themes and methods that have dominated his work for two decades.footnote＊ From the groundbreaking programmatic text, ‘Metacommentary’ (1971), to his more recent writings on postmodernism (represented here by ‘The Politics of Theory’ [1984] and ‘Architecture and the Critique of Ideology’ [1985]), virtually the full range of Jameson’s interests can be gleaned from these two volumes. And even though the title correctly identifies their overarching concern with theory, one finds here also what remains Jameson’s most engaging side: his considerable ingenuity as a reader of literary texts. The essays on RobbeGrillet and Thomas More, for example, whose ultimate topics are theoretical (modernism and utopian discourse, respectively), offer splendid original readings of individual texts (Jealousy and Utopia). The collection also includes a provocative introduction by Neil Larsen situating Jameson’s project in relation to certain critiques it has elicited both from within and beyond the Marxist camp.
Confronted by such a rich and heterogeneous body of texts, one is hard-pressed to give a fair account of their underlying methodological coherence. It is as if when finding ourselves baffled by the apparent eclecticism of Jameson’s enthusiasms—puzzled how he can with almost equal ease commend the procedures of Roland Barthes’s S/Z or Max Weber’s diagnoses of the passage in the West from religion to rationalization alongside Marx’s dicta on the universality of class struggle in history—we must seek to reconcile these conflicting research programmes, to synthesize them in that ‘totalizing explanation’ which Jameson holds to be Marxism’s signal claim to ‘formal superiority over all the other partial kinds of accounts.’ (Vol. 1, p. 133). We tend to be reassured when we pronounce Jameson’s Marxism as just old-fashioned Hegelianism, or an updated version of Lukácsian mediation theory, confident that we already know what all that means and what its blindnesses and theoretical weaknesses entail.