Promotional Information

Fredric Jameson takes on the allegorical form

About the Author

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University and recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, The Cultural Turn, and Representing Capital.

Reviews

Allegory and Ideology charges an antique form with renewed political urgency. At its heart is the melancholy conviction that we can never directly lay hold of history.
*Marx & Philosophy Review of Books*

Throughout this challenging, boundary-crossing new tome, we are repeatedly given such experiences of the intersection of the most minute details of a text and the grandest movements of history, making for a kind of head-spinning and euphoric journey. Yet this bewildering back-and-forth is in line, after all, with what the experience of the dialectic-with its unexpected connections between previously unrelated social strata-is supposed to feel like in the first place. In that, Jameson, as a dialectician, has once again achieved his aim.
*Critical Inquiry*

The world, it seems, keeps trying to catch up to Jameson, whose talent for dialectical unification still shines forth with radioactive power. After you've read him, it's impossible to unsee what he's shown you: his phenomenology of everyday life reveals the hidden architecture of the capitalist mode of produciton with the aesthetic aptitude of a modern novelist.
*Full Stop*

Allegory, for Jameson, is less a means of overriding difference than a means of preserving it. To look at history and find a great deal of allegory, as this book does, is to find in history, amidst all the destruction, an impulse to preserve and a large quantity of successful preservation.
*The Baffler*

Allegory and Ideology involves its readers in the process of intellectual discovery. We may learn from the author of Allegory and Ideology the delight in moving ideas around, forcing them to change the company they keep, in order to see what happens. Jameson's distinctive feature seems to be the way in which his periods rework and transform all objects of analysis by placing them in an ever-shifting syntactical architecture. His intense account of Auerbach's Dante can easily be read as a declaration of Jameson's own poetics. Nothing has a meaning, in Allegory and Ideology, if not through a complex relation to everything else.
*New Left Review*