NEW IN PAPERBACK:
VALENCES OF THE DIALECTIC
FREDRIC JAMESON
Published 25 October 2010
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“Fredric Jameson is America’s leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction... One of the great writers of our time, not just one of the most formidably gifted critics and cultural theorists.” — Terry Eagleton
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The dialectic, the concept of the evolution of an idea through conflicts arising from its inherent contradictions, transformed two centuries of Western philosophy. Now renowned cultural critic Fredric Jameson presents a comprehensive study of a misrepresented yet vital strain in Western philosophy.
In the twentieth century, both Hegelian and Marxist stagings of the dialectic – as metaphysical system or method for materialist historical analysis – have been discredited. Jameson’s lucid new synthesis of thought revitalizes dialectical thinking for the twenty-first century through rigorous, erudite examination.
On the way, he offers virtuoso readings of major thinkers of modern and contemporary philosophy, including Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, Sartre and Ricoeur.
Taking on the myriad questions that have arisen in the history of this philosophical tradition, Jameson brings theoretical scrutiny to illuminate the labyrinthine interconnections between theories of time, narrative, history, self.
VALENCES OF THE DIALECTIC charts a movement toward mapping a "spatial" dialectic, culminating in a magisterial analysis of commodification and globalization. Referencing the work of John Gray and Slavoj Zizek, amongst others, these remarkable meditations contextualise the debate for our times.
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Praise for Fredric Jameson
“Jameson's [is an] almost impossibly sophisticated variety of Marxist cultural criticism… the best of Jameson's work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you'd always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror” – Benjamin Kunkel, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n08/benjamin-kunkel/into-the-big-tent
“One of the more persuasive cognitive maps we have of the evolution of culture in the West in the period from the mid-twentieth century to the present day.” J. M. Coetzee
“Fredric Jameson is America’s leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction... One of the great writers of our time, not just one of the most formidably gifted critics and cultural theorists.” Terry Eagleton
“Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today…It can be truly said that nothing cultural is alien to him.” Colin MacCabe
“Jameson is one of the world’s most eminent cultural theorists, but he is also a peerless literary critic in the classical sense of the term, one whose strength has always been to grasp history or ideology as form, genre and style, as secretly at work in the grain and texture of literary language.” – LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
Praise for THE CULTURAL TURN
“Exploding like so many magnesium flares in the night sky, Fredric Jameson’s writings have lit up the shrouded landscape of the postmodern…The Cultural Turn offers the most compact and complete resumé on the subject.” Perry Anderson
Praise for POSTMODERNISM, OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM
“For anybody hoping to understand not just the cultural but the political and social implications of postmodernism…Jameson’s book is a fundamental, nonpareil text.” Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times
“The scope and profundity of Postmodernism, covering theory, architecture, film, video and economics, is truly staggering. This is brilliant stuff.” Ziauddin Sardar, Independent
“Oscillating between the intoxication of the latest postmodern theories and the sobriety of the Marxist tradition, Jameson's book confirms my belief that the most lucid and productive analyses of postmodernism have come from those who are hostile to, or at least deeply ambivalent about, its implications.” Simon Reynolds, The Observer
http://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2008/06/fredric-jameson-postmodernism-or.html
Praise for BRECHT AND METHOD
“There is no better example of a “Marxist scholastic” than Fredric Jameson.” – The Economist
http://www.economist.com/node/319207
“Perhaps the secret of Jameson’s greatness, like Brecht’s, is that he doesn’t adhere to his method too strictly.” – In These Times
Praise for FABLES OF AGGRESSION
“Jameson’s little book on Wyndham Lewis is an important and in many ways brilliant book, as much for its treatment of Lewis himself as for its two other important contributions: to an understanding of the ideology of modernism, and to an understanding of a socio-political-psychoanalytic theory of criticism.” Edward Said
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Fredric Jameson is the Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. He is the author of many books, including POSTMODERNISM, OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM, A SINGULAR MODERNITY. THE MODERNIST PAPERS, ARCHAEOLOGIES OF THE FUTURE, THE IDEOLOGIES OF THEORY and THE HEGEL VARIATIONS.
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ISBN 978-1-84467-463-3 / £16.99 / $29.95 / Paperback / 640 pages
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For more information or to buy the book visit:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/522-valences-of-the-dialectic
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