The Research Of Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconsciousness

Born in America in 1934, Fredric Jameson received doctor's degree of French in Yale University in 1959 and became Yale university professor in 1976. Now he is the professor in Duke University of America. Having broad outlook, Jameson contributes a lot in many fields. He is recognized as a guide of American humanities because of his important influence in the social and academic field.Since 1970s, Jameson began to commit himself to the study of Marxism. He wrote Marxism and Form (1971), The Prison-House of Language (1972)。Deeply influenced by Western Marxism, Jameson proposed a framework of dialectic criticism with the theoretical combination of structuralism and post-modernism, and afterwards developed a set of political poetics which he called"Hermeneutics of Marxism".In his The Political Unconsciousness: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act(1981),he made detailed interpretation to"Hermeneutics of Marxism"and"The Political Unconsciousness".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.In this thesis, Introduction part simply presents Jameson's background and his academic life, and then introduces the achievements in studying Jameson's academic idea and his The Political Unconsciousness. Lastly,the structure of The Political Unconsciousness, the key points and the outline of this thesis are stated.The first Chapter presents the main ideas and theoretical origin of Jameson's The Political Unconsciousness by putting Jameson's poetics of culture into his academic system and development. The first part traces the bases of Jameson's poetics of culture—idea of totality. Some points in The Political Unconsciousness are grasped by origin; the second part discusses another mainstay of Jameson's poetics of culture-dialectics of Ideology, which is mapping for his poetics of culture; the third part simply discusses the relation between history and literature in Jameson's poetics of culture.Chapter Two and Three are the focal point in this thesis. According to the writing feature of The Political Unconsciousness and Jameson's narrative style, this thesis analyzes the double action course of history and text from the two aspects of ideological construction and textual interpretation. Not only explains the idea that Jameson's literature is the action of social symbol, but also investigates Jameson's practice of textual interpretation.The clue in Chapter Two is how to construct ideology and realize it in literature from"history to text". Jameson considers history as the ultimate view of poetic of culture. He believes that all text of literature and culture should be put into total history in order to be illustrated well. Part One studies the concept, origin, principle and function of political unconsciousness. Part Two discusses some concepts, such as exchange of code.These are the important concepts since Jameson have integrated structuralism to develop Marxism, and also can show that political unconsciousness is capable of function and illustration. Part Three analyzes the core idea of The Political Unconsciousness—literature is the social symbol.The clue of Chapter Three is"from text to history". How to illustrate the text by Jameson is discussed, and besides, the ideology and class struggle behind the text are analyzed. Jameson considers text as the core of cultural poetics and narration of social symbolic behavior. Part One analyzes the basic theory of Jameson's hermeneutic methods of the three concentric circles. Part Two analyzes Jameson's important discovery of his literature hermeneutics, that is Ideologemes. Part Three discusses some concepts such as subject and close of ideology.In the conclusion part, the poetics of culture expressed in Jameson's The Political Unconsciousness is summarized and assessed. Jameson's development to hermeneutics of Marxism is mainly analyzed.