How To Do An Archaeological Survey On The "Future":Fredric Jameson On Science Fiction And The Hermeneutics Of The Future

Fredric Jameson is a most prominent Marxist theoretician in the contemporary America. The research topic of this essay dwells on his theory on the Hermeneutics of future. Jameson believes that "Utopia" as a social plan has been proven to be nonsense in a post-modern society. Only as a socio-economic sub-genre of a broader literary form of Science Fiction, can "Utopia" express the imagination of future. In this way, Science Fiction novels, especially its utopian sub-genre, is treated as a serious literary genre, and a new, unique research paradigm of literary of Western Marxism Hermeneutics on which SF based appears. The main academic achievement has published in 2005, and the book is called "Archaeologies of the Future:The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions".The dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter indicates the relationship among Science Fiction, Utopia, and the Hermeneutics of future. Jameson defines utopia as a socio-economic sub-genre of science fiction, which develops the continuation of the utopian turn in science fiction criticism. The criticism to this new genre is also put in a historical critical transformation. This chapter also sorts out the theoretical origins of three key terms.The second chapter discusses the double attributes and the time mechanism of the utopian texts. The Hermeneutics of future studies on the form of the Utopian texts, which is inherently connected to the "Political Unconscious" theoretical totality. Correspondingly it has both negative and positive interpretation. Moreover, this Utopian genre includes a nested time dimensions in which the historical, individual and collective time channels unite together. The Last part is a functional analysis of the text’s fictional characteristic.The third chapter sums up the methodologies of the Hermeneutics of future. "Cognitive mapping" method is invented to address the cognitive dilemma encountered by the subject in a post-modern "super space" situation. The core category of "Cognitive mapping" is space, which presents as Utopian enclave in a Utopian text. And the method also maps the history, which exits in the form of allegory in the Utopian text. Finally the method can be specifically elaborated in three formal levels. There are strategies of the "double inscription", generic discontinuities, and space dialects.