Mimesis, Expression, Construction

Fredric Jameson (born April 14, 1934) is a prominent American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is currently Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies (French) and the director of the Center for Critical Theory at Duke University. Among his best-known titles are Marxism and Form; The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act; Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; A Singular Modernity; Valences of the Dialectic; and The Antinomies of Realism.Octavian Esanu is an associate professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History and Director/Curator of the American University of Beirut Art Galleries. He is the author of What Does "Why" Mean?; Transition in Post-Soviet Art; Art, Awakening and Modernity in the Middle East; Contemporary Art and Capitalist Modernization; and The Postsocialist Contemporary.

"Jameson on Adorno? It's like reading Benjamin on Brecht, or Sartre on Baudelaire. A great Oedipal drama." "Mind-blowing... What we get here is not the insight in some secret core of Jameson's thought lost in later gentrified published versions but, on the contrary, a flow of improvisations and mental experimentations where the detours through secondary topics are often more precious than the main line of argumentation."