Fredric Jameson's Utopian Thought

Fredric Jameson is a famous Marxist critic and theorist in the United States.His theory is complicated and covers a wide range of subjects,while his exposition of Utopia is one of the main lines running through the whole process.Jameson's vision of utopia spans almost half a century.It is of great significance to understand and grasp Jameson's utopian thought in order to master Jameson's overall thoughtUtopian thought has always been valued by scholars,dating back to the ancient Hebrew prophets.Since Thomas More's utopia,a literary genre,Utopia has flourished;but by the 18th century or so,it had faded from literature to social science and philosophy.It was transformed in the early days of Marxism into a foil to the scientific socialism and,after the upheavals of the 1960s,almost a synonym for Stalinism.Obviously,politics is an indispensable dimension of utopian thought Jameson never avoids this point when he discusses the question of utopia,rather,he says that political practice is the proper meaning in the topic of his utopia thought.As a Marxist,he is very conscious to put his theory into practice,and put forward the revival of Utopia,a slogan of practical significanceThis paper is divided into five parts:Introduction,Chapter One to chapter three and conclusionThe introduction introduces the academic background and the significance of theory,the source and main research content,literature review,and research clues and ideasThe first chapter is an overview of utopian thought,a brief introduction to the utopian tradition in the Western Marxism,with emphasis on the three scholars who had an important influence on the formation of Jameson's utopian thought and their main ideas.They are Gyorgy Lukacs and his narrative theory and his criticism of alienation,Ernst Bloch and his philosophy of hope,Theodor W.Adorno and dialectical identity.And Jameson's utopia exploration and the main influence of utopia on modern society spanning more than half a century are briefly summarizedThe second chapter introduces the main content of Jameson's utopia thought,including two aspects,one is dystopia and utopia,the another is ideology and utopia As a theoretician,Jameson mainly presents himself as a literary critic,so his thoughts on utopia are combined with his thoughts on literature.For him,literature was a platform for a utopia in which people could defy realityThe third chapter is the role of utopia,which is mainly divided into two aspects,one is the practice of utopia,that is,cognitive mapping,cognitive mapping is a kind of thinking put forward by Jameson under the circumstances of the rise of post-modern spatial thinking mode,its essence is a kind of cultural and political aesthetics,with the characteristics of emphasizing dialectics,insisting on totality and historicism.Secondly,the mission of utopia,Jameson believes that the mission of utopia is to fail,one imagines a utopia not so much to achieve that ideal state of society as to perceive human limitations and realize that we are trapped in an ideological cage,anything that can be imagined is not a utopia,and the original utopia will lose its function as a utopia when it is realized in reality,even going to the opposite of utopia eventuallyThe conclusion summarizes the main contributions and shortcomings of the thesis,and suggests the problems that need to be further studied...