Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 Paralogisms and enchainment. Literary productions..., February 13, 2007
37 out of 44 found this review helpful
The Political Unconscious is a prodigious crical enterprise that unveils in a stimulating protean verve, the relationship between the political structure and the narrative enterprises of a variety of literary movements and/or individual authors. A model work of Marxist Criticism that sharpens our sensitivity and awareness in relation to the confines and intransigence of political schemas, for these affect and filter, construct and deflect the interpretation of artistic ouvres, while also creating the space for them within the tension provided. A treasure as is all of Jameson's criticism, his reading of Conrad's fiction is exceptional and vibrant in tone and exposition, to the extent that one rushes to re-read "Lord Jim" and plunge into a dialogue with Jameson while at it. Fredric Jameson is an artist and a cultural critic whose philosophy and literary analysis conveyed an American brand of Marxism that is second to none. The Political Unconscious is a fable, an historical approach that disseminates, and disrupts the fixed political schemas in a valient and elegant attempt at rousing readers from the slumber in which we are , however unconsciously, shrouded. A very important work indeed; It is with refreshing vigour that he reminds us of the importance of reading and writing. Yet he does so without the ascendancy of negative theology, such as is done by Blanchot and Agamben, although they also deserve our respect and gratitude. It is just that Jameson's texts are not mired in a restless solitude that asserts itself as feigned indifference. As was the case with Adorno and Allon White, a passionate surge is provoked, and the tragedy of being human(and all the more one of those doomed creatures known as scholars)is evoked in a confessed ambiguity that laments and hates the fact that it loves and believes in this, our life.
OF NOTE: A corresponding reading of Pierre Macheray "A Theory of Literary Production" for it will illuminate the theoretical impetus of the here reviewed book that much more.
 Jungian Mysticism Disguised as Marxist Criticism April 10, 2006
10 out of 19 found this review helpful
In his untenable book of mysticism, Jameson proposes that works of literature express the collective political unconscious of the age in which they are written, and that they are thus complicitous with power. While he allows for some complexity in this relationship between hegemonic politics and aesthetic production-works of literature, for example, express the deep history of class struggle-he ultimately collapses these categories: dominant politics and literature are one in every age, collapsed into a vague "ideology of form," and literature inevitably sides with the masters.
To forward his argument, Jameson adopts a Jungian definition of the unconscious from Northrop Frye while ignoring some of Frye's more poignant distinctions. For instance, in Frye's work, political, institutional language acts as a controlling commentary on the more profound and radical voice of literature, and they are thus at odds (Frye calls political language literature's "antipode"). However, Jameson's adoption of the Jungian unconscious for his model allows him a slippery, quasi-religious definition of the political unconscious-you cannot see it directly, but, like the wind, like God, it's everywhere, and we all believe in it all at once, whether we know it or not.
Equally "faith-based" criticism generated from Jameson's work has argued specifically that "canonical" authors such as Emerson and Thoreau expressed the political unconscious of the Jacksonian age, and that the critics in the early 20th century who canonized them expressed the political unconscious of the Cold War years, unconsciously underwriting American globalism. A twisted path leads to these conclusions (for example, we have to accept the untenable proposal that an ideology of American individualism lay at the heart of Cold War political ideology). However, the whole path could have been avoided if Jameson had taken Freud's version of the unconscious as his starting point-the place that holds taboo thought and images that have been traumatized out of the individual by a society of repression. This political unconscious would have given us a valid explanation for why activists, radicals, and everyday dissenters go to works of literature to remind themselves of what the political conscious of the age-with its outright, unsubtle, unliterary chatter-has buried in them.
Not About Dreams! October 1, 2003
15 out of 115 found this review helpful
This book is not about dreams, so if you want to know about dreams, you should get "The Dream Book" instead. I don't understand this book.
 Radical Vision, Utopian Prospective April 27, 2002
11 out of 51 found this review helpful
Jameson's groundbreaking literary criticism and sociological analysis underscore the release of the sublimated repressed desires in realist representation (realism) and orientates itself toward a relax of political unconscious.It mediates the symbolic narrative and its mirrored ideological interpellations. As a Marxist, he foresees the fuse of the super/infrastructure and a utopian sense of humanism that isolates from alienation and reification.
Tour de force literary criticism November 15, 2001
27 out of 32 found this review helpful
I read "The Political Unconscious" in college and was quite dazzled with it at the time. The book is quite difficult, and I approached it after reading another work of Marxist criticism, Terry Eagleton's "Literary Theory: An Introduction," which contains a footnoted reference to Jameson. The key thing about Jameson's book is that he forgoes a formalistic close-reading approach to works of narrative literature in favor of a historicist, totalizing vision. After I read the book, I recommended it to a graduate student in philosophy, who found it a brilliant synthesis, but no more. It is true that Jameson isn't a philosophical pathbreaker, but the fact that he has read and can convincingly use the work of German Hegelian Marxists like Theodor Adorno and especially George Lukacs is quite amazing. And his readings of authors like Gissing, Hofmannsthal, and Conrad are nothing if not supple. If "Marxist criticism" seems to you the recipe for disaster (or ignorance), this entrancing book is definitely the corrective for you!
|
