The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.59 (944 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 080149222X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 305 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-05-15 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Paralogisms and enchainment. Literary productions, Luca Graziuso and Marina Ross 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 t. "Essential critical theory" according to toronto. This is the touchstone book for Jameson's work, though much less popular than his book on Postmodernism. It requires a great deal of background and is not an easy read: but it was (is) a basic book in contemporary critical theory. It was written at a particular moment in the history of Marxist thought, and is saturated in what non-Marxists would consider to be a tiresome effort to extricate useful Marxist ideas from the grim history of Marx. Emberek said Tour de force literary criticism. 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, tota
Fredric Jameson (1934-). Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University and one of the most provocative and influential cultural critics of our age.
Throughout, he considers other interpretive approaches to the works he discusses, assessing the importance and limitations of methods as different as Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, dialectical analysis, and allegorical readings. Our understanding, he says, is colored by the concepts and categories that we inherit from our culture's interpretive tradition and that we use to comprehend what we read. Defining a mode of criticism and applying it successfully to individual works, it bridges the gap between theoretical speculation and textual analysis.. Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. How then can the literature of other ages be understood by readers from a present that is culturally so different from the past? Marxism lies at the foundation of Jameson's answer, because it conceives of history as a single collective narrative that links past and present; Marxist literary criticism reveals the unity of that uninterrupted narrative.Jameson applies his interpretive theory to nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, including the works of Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad. The book as a whole raises directly issues that have been only implicit
The Political Unconscious integrates and refines a vast body of theoretical work, demonstrating a superb mastery of the field of contemporary criticism. No one else encompasses as many positions within a disciplined critical practice. The result is a compelling, forceful argument in favor of the primacy of Marxism over contending strategies of interpretation."Nineteenth-Century Fiction "Monumental . The Political Unconscious is a major work, and it should be read by historians, social scientists, and philosophers, as well as by literary scholars."Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz. There is no cant, no cliché, no jargon in his work, only sustained dialectical reflection, His thesis concerning the political content of 'the unconscious' is p