Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

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Duke University Press, 1991 - Art - 438 pages
In his most wide-ranging and accessible work, Frederic Jameson argues that postmodernism is the cultural response to the latest systemic change in world capitalism. He seeks here to crystallize a definition of a term which has taken on so many meanings that it has virtually lost all historical significance. He presents an extensive discussion on the cultural landscape - both ‘high' and ‘low' - of postmodernity, evaluating the political fortunes of the new term and surveying postmodern developments in a range of different fields - from market ideology to architecture, from painting and instalment art to contemporary punk film, from video art and high literature to deconstruction. Finally, Jameson revaluates the concept of postmodernism in light of postmodern critiques of totalization and historical narratives - from the notion of decadence to the dynamics of small groups, from religious fundamentalism to hi-tech science fiction - while touching on the nature of contemporary cultural critique and the possibilities of cognitive mapping in the present multinational world system. This provocative book will be fundamental to all future discussions of postmodernism.

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Contents

The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
1
Theories of the Postmodern
55
Surrealism Without the Unconscious
67
Copyright

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About the author (1991)

Fredric R. Jameson, Marxist theorist and professor of comparative literature at Duke University, was born in Cleveland in 1934. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University and taught at Harvard, the University of California at San Diego, and Yale University before moving to Duke in 1985. He most famous work is Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which won the Modern Language Association's Lowell Award. Jameson was among the first to associate a specific set of political and economic circumstances with the term postmodernism. His other books include Sartre: The Origin of a Style, The Seeds of Time, and The Cultural Turn.

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