Utopian Horizons: Remembering Fredric Jameson
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Friday 25 October, 10AM–1PM
Level 4 Linkway, John Medley Building
University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus
Fredric R. Jameson (1934–2024) was a colossal intellectual figure and, by the end of his life, a theoretical institution in his own right. Author of countless books, Jameson was also a mentor to generations of scholars from all over the world, from the US and Brazil to China and elsewhere. Beginning with his first books on Sartre and Russian formalism, Jameson’s career ranged far and wide from expositions of dialectical thought in Marxism and Form (1971) to his field-defining intervention into literary interpretation, The Political Unconscious (1981), and the work for which he is perhaps still best known, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989). Yet in suitably dialectical fashion that book constitutes just one important moment in his discontinuous but career-spanning sequence The Poetics of Social Forms. Appropriately enough, this sequence’s first—and final—volume, Categories of the Narrative-Historical, is yet to be published. Beyond these major works, though, there are the monographs on topics from Raymond Chandler to The Phenomenology of Spirit, and hundreds of essays on a breathtaking range of social, cultural, political, theoretical and architectural phenomena whose utopian glimmers Jameson always took great care to discern—even, and perhaps especially, those shining through the most degraded artefacts of mass culture.
This commemorative event, presented by English and Theatre Studies, invites readers of Jameson to remember his work and legacy. We invite colleagues and friends to select a passage from his body of work and read it, with discussion to follow.
If you would like to contribute, please write to Jini Kim Watson, Joshua Barnes or Joe Hughes by 14 October and nominate the passage or section you would like to read.
All are welcome to present whether currently affiliated with a university or not; please circulate this notice to colleagues and friends who might be interested in speaking or attending.