Fredric Jameson is among the most prominent theorists of postmodernism and one of the foremost Marxist critics of his generation. In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), film occupies a central place in his account of the… Read More ›
Fredric Jameson
Postmodernism and Popular Culture
Most contributions to the debate on postmodernism agree that whatever else it is or might be, postmodernism has something to do with the development of popular culture in the late twentieth century in the advanced capitalist democracies of the West…. Read More ›
Postmodernism and Architecture
While motoring across the Californian desert, a young woman encounters a young male student engaged in the militant activities of May 1968. He is later shot by the police. Thanks to this encounter, her eyes are opened as to the… Read More ›
Stephen Greenblatt and New Historicism
While he was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Greenblatt helped to found a journal called Representations, in which some of the earlier important New Historicist criticism appeared. However, it was his introduction to The Power of Forms in… Read More ›
Post-colonial Allegory
The simplest definition of allegory is a ‘symbolic narrative’ in which the major features of the movement of the narrative are all held to refer symbolically to some action or situation. Allegory has long been a prominent feature of literary… Read More ›
Modernism, Postmodernism and Film Criticism
Postmodern cinema ironically has a history now. In 1984, Fredric Jameson observed that contemporary culture seemed to be expressing a new form of ‘depthlessness‘ – a concentration on style and ‘surface’. For Jameson these features represented a retreat from the… Read More ›
Anthropological Criticism: An Essay
Anthropological criticism refers, broadly speaking, to a form of criticism that situates the making, dissemination and reception of literature within the conventions and cultural practices of human societies. Such an undertaking has become increasingly suspect in the twentieth century as… Read More ›
Narrative Theory
Modern Narrative Theory begins with Russian Formalism in the 1920s, specifically with the work of Roman Jakobson, Yury Tynyanov, and Viktor Shklovsky. Tynyanov combined his skills as a historical novelist with Formalism to produce, with Jakobson, Theses on Language (1928),… Read More ›
Fredric Jameson as a Neo-Marxist Critic
Fredric Jameson outlined a dialectic theory of literary criticism in his Marxism and Form (1971), drawing on Hegelian categories such as the notion of totality and the connections of abstract and concrete. Such criticism recognises the need to see its… Read More ›
Althusserian Marxism
Louis Althusser combined Marxism with the scientifically oriented methods of Structuralism in his essay, Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses (1970) and analysed how the dominant systems enforce their control by subtly moulding their subjects through ideology. Ideology has been… Read More ›
Marxism and Literary Theory
Marxism is a materialist philosophy which tried to interpret the world based on the concrete, natural world around us and the society we live in. It is opposed to idealist philosophy which conceptualizes a spiritual world elsewhere that influences and… Read More ›
Postmodern Use of Parody and Pastiche
Postmodern literature’s celebratory mode of experimentation found new impetus with the usage of parody and pastiche. While a parody imitates the manner, style or characteristics of a particular literary work/ genre/ author, and deflates the original by applying the imitation… Read More ›
Fredric Jameson’s Concept of “Depthlessness”
Fredric Jameson, best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, called postmodern culture as one of “depthlessness” and as the cultural logic of late capitalism. “Late capitalism” implies that society has moved past the industrial age.and into the information… Read More ›
Postmodernism
Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern… Read More ›
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