The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 [Paperback]

Fredric Jameson (Author), PERRY ANDERSON (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1998

Frederic Jameson has had an immense impact on the way the phenomenon of postmodernism is understood. His pioneering work, postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of late Capitalism, has been widely acclaimed as the classic analysis of postmodernity, examined with an intellectual courage and skill that dared to interconnect cultural, historical, political, economic and philosophical perspectives. Jameson's constantly enriched reflections have become an essential reference point for all those attempting to grapple with the postmodern. However, until now, several of his key writings on the subject, from initial formulations to current developments, have been unavailable in an accessible form. This collection vividly illuminates the cultural turn of contemporary capitalism. Thus it includes his earliest insights, his responses to critics, his survey of alternative interpretations and his earliest insights, his responses to critics, his survey of alternative interpretations and his engagement with the cultural climate of the 1990s. The collection, introduced by Perry Anderson, includes a number of recent texts in which Jameson extends his method to new aspects of postmodern architecture and its relationship to political economy. The Cultural Turn is an indispensable guide to the thought of the most arresting and impressive theorist of postmodernism.

Editorial Reviews

Review

For anybody hoping to understand not just the cultural but the political and social implications of postmodernism, Jameson's book is a fundamental, nonpareil text. -- Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times [London]

About the Author

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, where he is Director of the Graduate Program in Literature and the Center for Critical Theory. He is the author of many critical works, in particular Late Marxism: Adorno, or The Persistence of the Dialectic (Verso); and the prize-winning Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; (Duke University Press, US and Verso, UK

Product Details

• Paperback: 206 pages
• Publisher: Verso (June 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859841821
• ISBN-13: 978-1859841822
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,427,896 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Essential Readings in Postmodern Theory, August 6, 2006

By 

K. Nishikawa (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (Paperback)

By no means an exhaustive reader of Jameson or of postmodern theory more generally, I found this collection of essays to be a useful, often illuminating, distillation of recent theoretical work on the relationship between art, consumerism, and temporality. The book is a fine supplement, if not sequel, to Jameson's magisterial *Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism*. But the essays presented here also stand on their own as discrete exempla of a properly dialectical, which is to say historically and materially grounded, account of postmodernism.

Far from being a free-floating notion of relativistic difference, Jameson argues that postmodernism is a specifically constituted ideology and aesthetic that derives from tendencies in post-World War II U.S. consumer culture. Chapters 1-4 (out of 8) are brilliant analytical unfoldings of this essential argument; included here are the classic, and might I add lucidly written, essays "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" and "Marxism and Postmodernism."

Chapters 5-8, representing Jameson's more recent forays into postmodern theory, are less satisfying but remain theoretically relevant. Chapter 5 doesn't really arrive at its object of analysis: the relationship between "end of art" and "end of history" discourses at the end of the Cold War. Chapter 6, on the image-form in contemporary cinema, lacks a certain rigor in approaching filmic texts, and its judgment on conceptions of beauty (whose appeal in today's independent cinema, it seems to me, doesn't necessarily entail the fetishization of individualistic sentimentality) is suspect. Still, and as another reviewer has noted, the ending of Chapter 8, "The Brick and the Balloon," is deeply illuminating with its call for a reconsideration of nostalgia in view of the ungrounding of history by consumer culture.

In sum, the collection as a whole offers what I think are essential readings in postmodern theory. These are not always the "easiest" pieces to read, but the very claim to easiness would seem to be one of the things Jameson is striking out against in his critique of consumer society. In any case, I found a majority of these essays to be accessible and well-written, although (and this is a crucial distinction) conceptually difficult. If you're willing to follow Jameson's train of thought, whether you agree, disagree, or otherwise -- that is, if you're willing simply to follow the implicit logic and its attendant textual readings, I suspect you will not mind making your way through the prose.

10 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not the best of Jameson, June 13, 2001

By 

"moldmonkey" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (Paperback)

I picked this one up because I thought it would be a nice relaxing series of short essays for a cross country plane trip. I was a bit disappointed. Its essays are of uneven quality, the first and last two being the best, and in order to get the little nuggets of pithy critical theory goodness out of muddled mass that is the rest of this book one has to do a bit of searching. In fact Cultural Turn was almost completely unmemorable, except for the interesting bit on architecture and spectrality in "Brick and the Balloon" (The last essay) and a few of the remarks on the myth of scarcity in the "Second World City" that are to be found in one of the first two pieces. Jameson's writing in Cultural Turn seemed crippled by a greater than usual density of language and jargon, unlike in Political Unconsious, which make several of these pieces tough on either the casual reader (like myself), or the reader who is not versed in Jameson's ideas or specific field of Marxist aesthetic critique. A good addition to other writings by Jameson and on various subjects, but not a pleasant escape or introduction.