The Ancients and the Postmoderns

In his new masterpiece of cultural analysis, Fredric Jameson offers an idiosyncratic examination of what might be called a provisional or disposable canon – what aesthetic history might look at as we enter an age of the immediate and of the unimaginable overpopulation of art and culture. With examples as far-flung as the great storytelling of the Renaissance painters, Wagner, H...

In his new masterpiece of cultural analysis, Fredric Jameson offers an idiosyncratic examination of what might be called a provisional or disposable canon – what aesthetic history might look at as we enter an age of the immediate and of the unimaginable overpopulation of art and culture. With examples as far-flung as the great storytelling of the Renaissance painters, Wagner, Hamlet, Mahler’s symphonies, twentieth-century American (Raymond Chandler, Robert Altman) and late modernist film (Kieślowski, Angelopoulos, Sokurov), science fiction (William Gibson), and finally the television series drama, Jameson shows the adaptability of artistic form. He ends with a final theoretical essay on the culture and economics of the pure present of late capitalism.

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 Cultur...

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.