Study Of Jameson's Totality Culture Aesthetics

Content: Fredric Jameson is one of the most famous West-Marxist critics and theorists.He is not only hold on to Marxist viewpoint of totality, but also converse with other west theorist and study contemporary capitalist culture. Base on these research work, he established his totality culture aesthetics, and furthermore richened and developed Marxist aesthetics. This thesis is mainly divided into three parts: The first part is about the origin and background of Jameson's thoughts of totality, which is the basis and method of his theory. He inherited totality thoughts of Hegel, Marx and some typical West-Marxist theorists and formed his theory under the circumstance of the transition from modernism to postmodernism. The second part studied Jameson's totality political hermeneutics aesthetics. He intended to construct a kind of dialectical criticism which can recover the true relationship between text and history. In his important work political unconsciousness, He raised a totality mode of text-history hermeneutics which include three expanding concentric interpretation circles. This hermeneutic mode uses the main code of Marxist hermeneutics, which is Marxist production mode, to reveal the political unconsciousness under the text. In Jameson's opinions, Marxist literature hermeneutics mode is both Ideological critique and Utopian construction. The last part discussed Jameson's postmodernist culturetheory. He uses the totality hermeneutics mode to expound postmodernist culture and disclose the economic source of culture. He takes postmodernism as the 'culture dominance' of late-capitalist society and analyses the characteristics of it. He thinks one of the most important characteristics of postmodernism is its spatiality, which means the subject will lost in postmodernist space, so he raised an 'cognitive mapping' aesthetics. Jameson's theory is worth our studying and referring.