The Cultural Turn

by Fredric Jameson

Book Overview

Designed as a short introduction to Fredric Jameson's thought for both the student and the general reader, this reader gives accessible coverage to his writings on postmodernism. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1859841821
• Release Date: June 1998
• Publisher: Verso
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Essential Readings in Postmodern Theory

By no means an exhaustive reader of Jameson or of postmodern theory more generally, I found this collection of essays to be a useful, often illuminating, distillation of recent theoretical work on the relationship between art, consumerism, and temporality. The book is a fine supplement, if not sequel, to Jameson's magisterial *Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism*. But the essays presented here also stand on their own as discrete exempla of a properly dialectical, which is to say historically and materially grounded, account of postmodernism. Far from being a free-floating notion of relativistic difference, Jameson argues that postmodernism is a specifically constituted ideology and aesthetic that derives from tendencies in post-World War II U.S. consumer culture. Chapters 1-4 (out of 8) are brilliant analytical unfoldings of this essential argument; included here are the classic, and might I add lucidly written, essays "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" and "Marxism and Postmodernism." Chapters 5-8, representing Jameson's more recent forays into postmodern theory, are less satisfying but remain theoretically relevant. Chapter 5 doesn't really arrive at its object of analysis: the relationship between "end of art" and "end of history" discourses at the end of the Cold War. Chapter 6, on the image-form in contemporary cinema, lacks a certain rigor in approaching filmic texts, and its judgment on conceptions of beauty (whose appeal in today's independent cinema, it seems to me, doesn't necessarily entail the fetishization of individualistic sentimentality) is suspect. Still, and as another reviewer has noted, the ending of Chapter 8, "The Brick and the Balloon," is deeply illuminating with its call for a reconsideration of nostalgia in view of the ungrounding of history by consumer culture. In sum, the collection as a whole offers what I think are essential readings in postmodern theory. These are not always the "easiest" pieces to read, but the very claim to easiness would seem to be one of the things Jameson is striking out against in his critique of consumer society. In any case, I found a majority of these essays to be accessible and well-written, although (and this is a crucial distinction) conceptually difficult. If you're willing to follow Jameson's train of thought, whether you agree, disagree, or otherwise -- that is, if you're willing simply to follow the implicit logic and its attendant textual readings, I suspect you will not mind making your way through the prose.