Marxism, postmodernism, theory: Rhetoric and figure in the works of Fredric Jameson

In this dissertation I read the theoretical works of Fredric Jameson in the way that literary works are now read: that is, I interpret the rhetoric and figures of the texts as political and theoretical articulations of late capitalist or postmodern problematics.;Fredric Jameson is a leading American cultural critic and theoretician: in particular, his work engages with Marxism as an interpretive tool for understanding all varieties of artistic expression: literature, film, architecture, mass culture, and literary theory itself.;In the introduction of this dissertation, I outline its contents but also my methodology. This last is, concisely, to permit a fairly wide-ranging and poetic style as a way of connecting Jameson's work with a context of postmodern culture in general. In chapter one, I discuss the fate of Marxism, as both theory and political philosophy, in terms of the East European revolutions of 1989 and the various critiques mounted by post-structuralism and feminism. I conclude that the totalizing claims of Hegelian Marxism, far from rendering it out-dated, demonstrate the limits of critiques and the continuing applicability of Marxism as a system.;In chapter two, I consider mostly Jameson's pivotal work from the early 1970s, Marxism and Form. There, I argue, Jameson uses a fundamentally literary and intertextual method to explicate and introduce "Western Marxism" (Lukacs, Bloch, Adorno) to an American audience. In chapter three, I analyze what is probably Jameson's must influential work, The Political Unconscious, accounting both for his discourse on French Marxism (Sartre and Althusser) and for his readings of Balzac and Conrad. Finally, in chapter four, I analyze Jameson's interventions into theories of mass culture (in particular, film) and postmodernism.