Fredric Jameson was an American literary theorist, Marxist philosopher and comparative literature scholar. He is best known for his work on postmodernism and cultural theory, particularly his 1991 book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Jameson received the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize in 1991 and its Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award in 2012.
Fredric Ruff Jameson was born on 14 April 1934 in Cleveland, Ohio. His father, Frank S. Jameson, was a doctor; his mother, Bernice Ruff, had studied at Barnard College. In 1935, the family moved to New Jersey and settled in Haddon Heights by the late 1940s. Jameson attended Moorestown Friends School and graduated in 1950.
He studied French at Haverford College, graduating summa cum laude with a BA in 1954. While at Haverford, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and studied under Wayne Booth. After graduating, he travelled through Europe, studying in Aix-en-Provence, Munich, and Berlin. It was there that he encountered continental philosophy and structuralism. In 1955, he returned to the United States to pursue a PhD in French literature at Yale, under the guidance of Erich Auerbach. His dissertation, The Origins of Sartre's Style, was completed in 1959.
Between 1959 and 1967, he taught French and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. In 1967, he moved to the University of California, San Diego, to teach Marxist theory and collaborate with Herbert Marcuse. In 1969, he co-founded the Marxist Literary Group. Further appointments followed at Yale (1976) and the University of California, Santa Cruz (1983).
In 1985, he moved to Duke University. There, he became Director of the Institute for Critical Theory and held the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Professorship of Comparative Literature. He also established the university’s programme in literary studies. In the same year, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Jameson's early work centred on Sartre and existentialism, but he soon developed an interest in Marxist cultural theory. In The Political Unconscious (1981), he introduced his famous imperative, 'always historicise', and set out a model for interpreting literature through historical frameworks. According to Jameson, “History is the ultimate horizon of understanding”.
His significant contribution to postmodern theory came with the publication of his 1991 book, Postmodernism. Originally published as an article in 1984, it described postmodern culture as the ideological expression of late capitalism. Jameson observed that parody had been replaced by pastiche, and he argued that 'there no longer seems to be any organic relationship' between history and everyday experience.
His other works include Archaeologies of the Future (2005), The Hegel Variations (2010) and Representing Capital (2011). The Antinomies of Realism won the 2014 Truman Capote Award. Jameson also developed the concepts of cognitive mapping and the vanishing mediator.
Fredric Jameson passed away in Killingworth, Connecticut, on September 22, 2024.
