| This dissertation examines the problematics of Fredric Jameson's Hegelian-Marxism through his dialogue with Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Northrop Frye and his conception of neo-Gramscian cultural politics in the day of multi-national capitalism. Derrida demystifies truth and meaning as Marx did value and commodity; de Man's rigorous unmasking of ideological aberrations asserts a close affinity with Althusserian discourse; Frye's conception of utopian culture is readily appropriable to Marxism. But from Jameson's point of view, their synchronic thinking all fails to take into account non-linguistic or non-narrative history. Appropriating their theoretical insights from an historical perspective, Jameson puts their projects to use for Marxism.; The grounding category of this study is "History," the key to understanding the Hegelian-Marxist project Jameson champions. The first chapter, which provides a theoretical basis for the discussion in the following chapters, presents Jameson's "History" as a figure of differance beyond the linguistic moment and his critique of Derridean deconstruction from the Marxian dialectical perspective. Chapter II discusses the allegorical model of reading shared between Jameson and de Man and their debate on the issues of ideology and history. Chapter III explores Jameson's use of Frye for his doctrine of the political unconscious and his dialectic of the utopian and the ideological. The final chapter focuses on Jameson's provocative theorizing of third world culture as a point of Otherness from which to critique postmodernism, which he believes to be characterized by the lack of critical distance and depth. Jameson rewrites the Hegelian Master-Slave in terms of first and third worlds, mobilizing third-worldism, internal and external, for a neo-Gramscian model of enclaved resistance to the total system of late capitalism.; This study is designed to demonstrate how Jameson attempts to resolve the crisis in contemporapy synchronic thinking as well as in traditional Marxism. Advocating dialectical criticism in poststructuralist terminology, Jameson mediates text and history, and macro- and micro-structural politics, considerably broadening the horizon for cultural study. While giving full weight to Jameson's dialectical thinking, this dissertation concludes by confronting Jameson with some of the problems he has left unresolved. |
