An Inquiry Into Jameson's Theory Of Literary Forms

Fredric Jameson is a contemporary American Marxist literary and cultural critic. This dissertation is to probe into Jameson's theory of literary forms, including theoretical construction, its contents,and its critical practice. The discussion is being done in the context of traditional Marxism, Western Marxism, and contemporary literature criticism, in which new understandings of the tenets, such as form, history, interpretation and narrative have been given. A combination of logical reasoning and textual interpretation is the principal line that runs through the research.The whole dissertation is composed of eight parts.The introduction part traces back Jameson's thoughts and academic achievement, followed by overall evaluation of the researches on Jameson both in China and abroad, the coming up of the research question and its task.Chapter I is devoted to a study of some representative schools of form theory in the history of western literature criticism. Focus is put on Western Marxist's notion of form,which has much influence on Jameson, followed by Jameson's evaluation on different notions of form, absorption of those, and his rethinking of literary forms.Chapter II studies Jameson's research into Russian formalism and structuralism from the perspective of language. Jameson focuses his discussion of Russian formalism on"literariness"and"defamiliarization", and examines different schools of structuralism with different perspectives. When confirming the good points of Russian formalism and structuralism, their limits have been made clear.Chapter III discusses Jameson's observation of the interrelation between content and form. He argues that the foci of interpretation of literary works should be on form rather than content, not like what orthodox Marxists have done, because for Marx and Engels literary study is more politically oriented and content is much more ideologically charged, therefore they are more concerned with content rather than form. The interpretation of literary works should find what it is behind literary forms, that is, literary forms should and can be studied from the perspective of history.Chapter IV focuses on some key tenets of Jameson's theory of literary forms, such as"ideology of form","inner form","dialectal criticism". Jameson attempts to integrate Marxist literature criticism and formal criticism, and makes an inquiry into the relationship between form and narration, and that between interpretation and ideology; therefore dialectal criticism can be obtained.Chapter V deals with Jameson's viewpoints of genre criticism in Marxist literary criticism, probing into the"formal sedimentation"and"generic discontinuity"in the development of genre, and rethinking the relationship between genre and historical context. Jameson's genre theory primarily focuses on romance, to which Northrop Frye contributes a lot. Jameson's discussion of romance is deeply embedded with the ideological elements which he absorbed from Northrop Frye. And also Jameson transfers his focus onto science fiction in postmodern context, attempting to examine the political implication of science fiction.In Chapter VI, Jameson attempts to make an analysis of Balzac's La Vieille Fille and La Rabouilleuse, George Robert Gissing's'Experimental'Novels Thyrza and The Nether World, and Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim to reveal the ideologies"desire"and"ressentiment"and"reification"respectively.The last part presents main arguments, conclusions, and innovation of the thesis, with a further exploration of the significance and limits of Jameson's theory of literary forms.