On Jameson

Caren Irr is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at Brandeis University. She is the coeditor (with Jeffrey T. Nealon) of Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique, also published by SUNY Press, and the author of The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the U.S. and Canada during the 1930s. Ian Buchanan is Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. He is the author of Deleuzism: A Metacommentary and Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist.

"The first question to ask about an edited volume is: why does it exist? The material on Jameson in English is relatively meager considering the extent of his influence, and so any book dedicated to a close engagement with his work is welcome. By a slightly more ambitious commonsense criterion—a volume like this should collect important essays on an important topic in a more or less coherent way—the book succeeds admirably." — symplokē"The contributors exude a sense of the younger generation claiming Jameson's work as its own, not defensively or by simple identification with any political line, but as part of an ongoing set of intellectual struggles with the best that has been known and thought about the largest issues of their/our own time." — Bruce Robbins, author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress

• IntroductionCaren Irr and Ian Buchanan PART I CENTRAL CONCEPTS 1. Generally HistoricizingEvan Watkins 2. History, Narrative, and Realism: Jameson’s Search for a MethodCarolyn Lesjak 3. A Level Playing Field? Metacommentary and MarxismRoland Boer 4. Narratives of History, Narratives of TimeSean Homer PART II REACTIONS AND READINGS AROUND THE WORLD 5. Cultural Revolution, the Discourse of Intellectuals, and Other Folk TalesRobert Seguin 6. Construction Work: Theory, Migration, and Labor in the Age of GlobalizationMichael Rothberg 7. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Postcommunism?: The Cultures of the Former Soviet Bloc Encounter JamesonVitaly Chernetsky PART III TOWARD GLOBALIZATION 8. National Allegory Today: A Return to JamesonIan Buchanan 9. Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, GlobalizationImre Szeman 10. The American Grounds of Globalization: Jameson’s Return to HegelCaren Irr 11. Periodizing Jameson, or, Notes toward a Cultural Logic of GlobalizationPhilip E.Wegner Contributors Index