Fredric Jameson : beyond a Marxist hermeneutic?

This thesis provides a critical study of the theoretical work of the North American Marxist theoretician and critic Fredric Jameson. Jameson has been described as probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today and yet there has been no major study of his work published to date. This thesis sets out to contribute to such a study. One reason for Jameson's relative critical neglect has been his adherence to a tradition of Marxist thought, that both within Marxism itself and theoretical discourse in general has been superseded by Structuralist and more recently Post-structuralist modes of thought. The first chapter, therefore, provides an exposition of Jameson's Hegelianism which is rather more sympathetic to Hegel and dialectical theory than the accounts one usually encounters today filtered through Structuralist and Post-structuralist readings. The following three chapters focus upon key areas of theoretical debates that have emerged over the last two decades - that is, questions of history and representation, desire and subjectivity and finally postmodernism. The concluding chapter returns to the concerns with which this study opened and once more reflects upon issues of totality, politics and style from the perspective of having worked through Jameson's own corpus of work.