Inventions of a Present
The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization
Published on 7. May 2024
Book
Hardback
272 pages
978-1-80429-240-2 (ISBN)
Description
A novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the naive reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation and, in the best and most intense cases, to propose a wholly new idea of what constitutes an event or of the very experience of living. The most interesting contemporary novels are those which try-and sometimes manage-to awaken our sense of a collectivity behind individual experience, revealing a relationship between the isolated subjectivity and a class or community. But even if this happens (which is rare), one must go on to find traces of collective praxis hidden away within the awakened feeling of inter-connection. And since it is in the sense of the nation and nationality that collectivity is most often expressed, there is an urgent need to disengage the possibilities of genuine action within these areas.
This sweeping collection of essays ranges from the elusive politics of North American literature to the sometimes frozen narrative experiences of the eastern countries and the Soviet Union and beyond. This is a voyage traversing the globe, discovering a common kinship between each literary destination in late capitalism itself.
This sweeping collection of essays ranges from the elusive politics of North American literature to the sometimes frozen narrative experiences of the eastern countries and the Soviet Union and beyond. This is a voyage traversing the globe, discovering a common kinship between each literary destination in late capitalism itself.
Reviews / Votes
Fredric Jameson is America's leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction. -- Terry Eagleton Exploding like so many magnesium flares in the night sky, Fredric Jameson's writings have lit up the shrouded landscape of the postmodern. -- Perry Anderson Jameson has long been the most alluring American literary theorist, the only one to match the French in style and depth. -- Angela Woodward * Los Angeles Review of Books * Not often in American writing since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force. The best of Jameson's work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms. -- Benjamin Kunkel * London Review of Books * The most muscular of writers. * Times Literary Supplement * Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today. It can truly be said that nothing cultural is alien to him. -- Colin MacCabe Jameson thinks dialectically in the strong sense, in the way we are all supposed to think but almost no one does. -- Michael Wood * London Review of Books * Jameson's latest book shows him at the height of his powers, carving out his novel alternative. -- Robert T. Tally Jr * Jacobin * Jameson's Inventions of the Present is highly ambitious in scope both thematically and regionally...Inventions of a Present does not provide a departure from Jameson's previous criticism but instead complements his older perspectives on First World/Third World literature and capitalism's role in the marketplace of ideas and stories. -- Ashley Yung * Oxford Political Review * A timely collection of pieces about the historical novel and reading them brings home [Jameson's] tremendous power of analysis. * The Prisma * Jameson's efforts to account for our globalized world were of course imperfect, incomplete, necessarily partial; and that partiality comes to be instructive in itself, hinting how we might proceed with a reading of the gaps. -- James David * Protean *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 237 mm
Width: 159 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
424 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80429-240-2 (9781804292402)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
05/2024
Verso Books
€33.99
Available for download
Person
Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.
Content
Introduction
1. Allegories of the Hunter
2. Limits of the Gringo Novel
3. Form-Problems in Henry James
4. Language and Conspiracy in Delillo and Yurick
5. The Autonomous Work of Art: Utopian Plot-Formation in The Wire
6. Flashes of World War II
7. Germany's Double Plots
8. An Eastern Waiting Room
9. Immortal Stalingrad
10. The USSR that Wasn't
11. Faith and Conspiracy in Japan
12. History as a Family Novel
13. The Religions of Dystopia
14. Fear and Loathing in Globalization
15. The Novel and the Supermarket
16. Temporalities of the Sea
17. A Businessman in Love
18. The Failure of Success
19. Days of the Messiah
Index
1. Allegories of the Hunter
2. Limits of the Gringo Novel
3. Form-Problems in Henry James
4. Language and Conspiracy in Delillo and Yurick
5. The Autonomous Work of Art: Utopian Plot-Formation in The Wire
6. Flashes of World War II
7. Germany's Double Plots
8. An Eastern Waiting Room
9. Immortal Stalingrad
10. The USSR that Wasn't
11. Faith and Conspiracy in Japan
12. History as a Family Novel
13. The Religions of Dystopia
14. Fear and Loathing in Globalization
15. The Novel and the Supermarket
16. Temporalities of the Sea
17. A Businessman in Love
18. The Failure of Success
19. Days of the Messiah
Index