Fredric Jameson ’50

Fredric Jameson, a world-renowned cultural theorist and literary critic who influenced generations of scholars, died on September 22 at the age of 90. He was the 2015 recipient of the Alumni Association’s Alice Paul Merit Award.

He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. He wrote over thirty books, including his most famous Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981). At Duke University, he was the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, teaching courses covering modernism, postmodernism theory and culture, Marx and Freud, and the modern French novel and cinema. He was also
a Professor of Romance Studies (French), and Director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke. In 2008, Jameson was awarded the annual Holberg International Memorial Prize, the most prestigious interdisciplinary award in the social sciences, in recognition of his career-long research “on the relation between social formations and cultural forms.”

Numerous tributes were written after Fredric’s passing:

The New York Times:
Fredric Jameson, who held sway as one of the world’s leading literary theorists for over 40 years, bringing his brand of rigorous, incisive Marxist criticism to topics as broad as German opera, sci-fi films and luxury hotel design, died on Sunday at his home in Killingworth, Conn. For decades, Mr. Jameson’s voluminous work — more than 30 books and edited collections as well as reams of journal articles — has been required reading for graduate students (and some precocious undergraduates), not just in literature but also in film studies, architecture and history.

Duke Today:
Jameson came to Duke in 1985 and for 18 years directed Duke’s Program in Literature, which in addition to teaching traditional comparative literature also focused on critical theory — an examination of philosophical issues connected to culture and literature. “There are very few other programs that do that,” Jameson said in 2003, the year he stepped down as director. “I think we have a rather special reputation. … It’s a program that doesn’t have an equivalent anywhere else.” After graduating from Haverford College with a B.A. in 1954,
Jameson attended Yale for graduate school, earning his Ph.D. in 1959. One of the first scholars to bring French and German theory to the United States, Jameson wrote on such topics as film, architecture, painting and science fiction. He was one of the first scholars to give serious attention to science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.

Duke University Press:
Jameson’s influence on Duke University Press cannot be overstated. Senior Executive Editor Ken Wissoker says, “For many years I referred to the Press as ’the house that Fred built’ the way Yankee Stadium was called ’the house that Ruth built.’ It’s hard to imagine Duke University or Duke University Press without Fred’s intellectual leadership, his global reach, and his scholarly genius. He brought many authors to the Press, and many scholars to Duke, changing criticism and the humanities here and around the world. It’s an incomparable legacy. In 1991 we published Jameson’s book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which remains our all-time bestseller and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. It received the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association.

The Architect’s Newspaper:
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism was arguably Jameson’s best known book where, in 1991, he referenced Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Michael Graves, Frank Gehry, John Portman and other architects to explore the schism between high modernism and postmodernism; and that schism’s cultural, political, and economic ramifications more broadly. “Architecture is, however, of all the arts that is closest constitutively to the economic,” Jameson famously postulated, “with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship: it will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the
new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it.”

The Conversation:
Over the course of his long and influential career, Jameson published 34 books and hundreds of articles. Along with his legendary conference interventions, they attest to perhaps the single most generous and sustained act of attention to cultural forms in human history. His work took in a mind-boggling array of materials. Colin MacCabe once quipped that “nothing cultural was alien to him”. Though Jameson’s training was in German and French literature (under Wayne C. Booth and Erich Auerbach), he went on to master Western Marxism and French theory, before turning his tireless mind to architecture, theatre, film, television, opera, symphonic form, pulp fiction, painting, and what seemed to be every book written in any language worthy of our attention.