Fredric Jameson (1934-2024): Philosopher, cultural critic, and America's pre-eminent Marxist cultural thinker
Terry Eagleton has just called Fredric Jameson, who passed Sunday before last, at 90, «the greatest cultural critic of his time, though the term 'cultural critic' is a mere place holder for a kind of intellectual work spanning aesthetics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, political theory and the like, for which we have as yet no adequate name. There was nothing in the field of humanities which didn't claim his attention...
.» Jameson wrote 30 books, and an infinite number of scholarly articles, in a rewarding and scintillating life.
He taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of California at San Diego, before moving to Duke University in 1985, and he stayed there until he retired. He said: «I have never wanted to make a very great distinction between philosophy and literature.
It seems to me that one reads both — they're both a form of enjoyment, if you like.... They're both the invention of languages — that's what I should say.» Therefore, we regard Jameson as a philosopher, as well as a literary and cultural critic, who is primus inter pares.
He disagrees with Ludwig Wittgenstein about there being no private languages: «It seems to me that the great modern writers are all inventors of a different language.» All novelists have their private languages, and we, as readers and critics, gain a deep and fulfilling access to this language (I like to think of it as a version of Gerard Manley Hopkins' inscape), coupled with their myriad modes of thinking and inner mental landscapes, as we read.
I first read Fredric Jameson as a graduate student in 1981, at Dalhousie University, in Canada, where I was studying as a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar. One of our English Department's brightest
