Widely regarded as one of America's most important cultural theorists, Fredric Jameson has been at the forefront of the field of literary and cultural studies since the early 1970s. Author of "The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act and Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism", Jameson is without doubt one of the leading intellectuals of our time. "Fredric Jameson: Live Theory" offers an invaluable and highly accessible introduction to the work of this important thinker. Ian Buchanan explores and illuminates how Jameson forms his concepts and how they operate, providing a fascinating account of Jameson's important and ongoing contributions to Critical Theory. The book provides a clear sense of his overall project and the marvellous productivity of his thinking. Motivated by a desire to inaugurate social change by illuminating the obstacles standing in its way, the aim of Jameson's work is to dishabituate us from the comfortable feeling that modern life is enhanced by the global grip of capitalism. The book concludes with a new interview with Jameson himself, in which he discusses the key themes and issues in his work and future directions for the Jamesonian project. Thematically organised, clear and accessible, "Fredric Jameson: Live Theory" is a key resource for anyone studying this pioneering thinker.
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"Much of the originality of Buchanan's account here lies in a chapter that maps Jameson's influences, in Sartre, Adorno, Barthes, and Brecht...The fascinating transcodings between this generation of theorist and Jameson's own is also the subject of a rare biographical interview. Such concluding interviews are a signature of Continuum's Live Theory series...The deeper lesson of Buchanan's book may well lie in mapping the continuities of this past to the globalizing present, as Jameson's tools for dismantling the engine of history lie dormant in debates that are so often as difficult and complex as the history of the twentieth century itself." Darren Jorgensen, University of Western Australia, Symploke, Vol. 15.1/2, 2008--Darren Jorgensen
About the Author
Ian Buchanan is Professor and Foundation Chair of Communication and Cultural Studies at Charles Darwin University, Australia. He is editor of Fredric Jameson's Interviews 1982-2002 (Duke, 2004) and co-editor of On Jameson (SUNY, 2004).
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
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Great Book
11 Sep 2007
By ABC
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
This is a great book for several reasons. First, it's easy to read: it's clearly written and it's informative. Second, it makes you want to read or re-read Jameson. Buchanan makes books you already thought were interesting even more interesting. Third, it makes you want to read more Buchanan--and you should because this book is not only the culmination of a series of detailed essays on Jameson published over the past few years, but also a restatement of many of the themes developed in his Deleuze book and his other work. Fourth, it is oriented as much toward the practice of cultural criticism as it is toward its theory. And finally, what I find particularly helpful about the book is that Buchanan manages in less than 120 pages to give the reader a sense of the unity of Jameson's work by reading everything from the Sartre book to Marxism and Form to the more recent work on cognitive mapping and utopia as part of an "as yet uncompleted totalizing account of realism, modernism and postmodernism." This book is definitely worth a read.
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Fredric Jameson: Live Theory by Ian Buchanan
12 Aug 2007
By Adrian Zaretsky
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
Buchanan rigorously investigates the Jamesonian project by clearly engaging with the many facets of cultural praxis Fredric Jameson has examined: literature, film, architecture, and art. More than just a user-friendly survey of key ideas, Buchanan's book is chiefly interested in shedding light on how the logic of postmodernism, the political unconscious and dialectical criticism work in everyday life. This study is simple without falling prey to turning the cacophonous theoretical performance of Jameson into a dreary overview of key themes. Although very much concerned with examining his corpus from a philosophical perspective, Buchanan's book is much more than an exposition of the role of dialectical criticism in Jameson's thought, or even a description of his key concepts such as utopia and cognitive mapping. In a fundamental and rigorous way Buchanan brings Jameson to life, hence the very appropriate subtitle - Live Theory - by examining the philosophical currents within which Jameson swims. Using his wealth of critical experience in both the work of Deleuze and Jameson, Buchanan takes a Deleuzian approach to his study of this great American cultural theorist. That is, he enables us to see points of crossover and departure with Adorno, Barthes, Brecht, Debord, Deleuze, Foucault, Hegel, Lyotard, and Sartre. In this way, the book is much more than a general introduction in that it articulates the theoretical complexity and seemingly disparate trajectories Jameson follows within an ongoing discourse of everyday life and culture. Buchanan stresses the importance of coming to grips with the realities of how things are in order to think about how things might be, pointedly turning the utopian impulse that Jameson articulates in the readers' direction, inviting us to critically engage and experiment with the concrete material conditions of our contemporary life.
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