Fredric Jameson has become a memory. However, this American literary theorist’s studies, no matter whether they carry mature Hegel or Young Marx. He had entered the field with his 1971 thesis, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Easy to be labelled, very few scholars discussed the work. Nevertheless, Jameson became famed for his book, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act,the classic that opens with the most widely quoted slogan, ‘Always Historicise’. 

Jameson’s theorisation has been an object of engagement for philosophers and cultural theorists with the publication of his 1991 work, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which beautifully demonstrates how postmodern thinking obfuscates between the cultural and the real. Jameson believed that the central problem of postmodernism has been a capsized logic emerging out of the crisis of its historicity. He diffuses this crisis across multiple fields such as literature, economics, architecture, philosophy, film, television, and mass media. A literary theorist unfailingly holding on to the concept of historically contingent real, Jameson had been impatient of postmodern dilation of the cultural domain inspiring consumers to celebrate market, legitimise commodification and naturalise commodity fetishism.

Marxism has been central to his historical hermeneutics in literary criticism. However, Jameson had no hesitation to be eclectic in his interpretations of nuances. He has used insights drawn from Spinoza’s necessity of knowledge, Hegel’s phenomenology of the Zeitgeist dialectics, Bergson’s objectivity of time, Nietzsche’s notion of the excluded middle, Heidegger’s philosophy of inseparability between the world and human existence, Lacan’s theory of the unconscious, Foucault’s concept of discourse, Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideologeme, and Deleuze’s vitalist ideas. While emphasising the material basis of class conflicts and revolt in cultural texts, Jameson celebrates the ideology of utopia and liberation as well.

Jameson boldly walked head-aloft all along his four decades of trailblazing academic career making lasting contributions in the field of cultural theory and literary criticism. He will be remembered as a Marxian theorist in literary criticism and cultural analyst in Postmodern Capitalism.