{"id":60766,"date":"2024-10-21T08:18:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-21T07:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/?p=60766"},"modified":"2024-10-21T16:13:24","modified_gmt":"2024-10-21T15:13:24","slug":"fredric-jameson-in-pmla-or-metacommentary-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2024\/10\/21\/fredric-jameson-in-pmla-or-metacommentary-and-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Fredric Jameson in PMLA; or, \u201cMetacommentary\u201d and More"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Our greatest thinker, Fredric Jameson, died on 22 September 2024 at the age of ninety. His example of socially meaningful interpretation\u2014indeed, his commitment to Marxism\u2014is fundamental, now more than ever. With writings spanning some six decades, he built up an immense critical foundation and edifice on every topic, every medium, that matters to the thinking and feeling person. He will remain the base to the superstructure of all criticism to come. With him, we can interpret the world in order to change it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Any book or selection of essays by Jameson is a consistent expression of his ideas and approach. But it so happens that his paper titled \u201cMetacommentary,\u201d appearing in PMLA<\/em> in 1971, is one of the most important articles about interpretive method in his entire oeuvre, ranking alongside his well-known essay on postmodernism published in 1984 in the New Left Review<\/em> with its briefer forays into methodology (\u201cPostmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism\u201d; New Left Review<\/em>, vol. 146, July-Aug. 1984, pp. 55\u201356).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beneath that curious word, \u201cmetacommentary,\u201d lies the entire hermeneutic that was to unfold in Jameson\u2019s later works, like The Political Unconscious<\/em> (1981), with iterations across every single book to follow. I mean not to identify what\u2019s unwavering about his method from his earliest to his latest works but rather to explore what\u2019s incontestable about his approach, recognizing that the names we now have for his interpretive practices, whether \u201cdialectical,\u201d \u201cJamesonian,\u201d \u201cAlways historicize!,\u201d or something else, don\u2019t begin to capture the power and persuasion of his thinking<\/em>, always in the mode of this thing he dubbed \u201cmetacommentary.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So much is already there in \u201cMetacommentary\u201d: totality, the collective and its \u201cdestinies,\u201d synchrony, diachrony, ideology, allegory, science fiction, levels of interpretation, work, and Marx\u2014all of which we recognize in later Jameson. And it\u2019s from this signal essay that I would recommend reading Jameson\u2019s other works. For example, \u201cLa Cousine Bette<\/em> and Allegorical Realism\u201d is overtly paired with \u201cMetacommentary,\u201d not only in the way it appears in the very next quarterly issue of PMLA<\/em> in 1971, but because Jameson\u2019s epigraph in this second installment is drawn from his own words in the previous essay. Granted, everyone cites themselves eventually, but I\u2019ve not seen a scholar do this<\/em> before. But Jameson gets a pass, if for no other reason than that the epigraph stands as a methodological statement to say that what follows in \u201cLa Cousine Bette<\/em> and Allegorical Realism\u201d is itself metacommentary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s worth recalling that what\u2019s missing from \u201cMetacommentary\u201d but present in \u201cLa Cousine Bette<\/em> and Allegorical Realism\u201d (243, 244, 251), as well as the other essays he published in PMLA<\/em>, is that august term, the \u201cdialectic.\u201d That Jameson doesn\u2019t speak of dialectics per se in \u201cMetacommentary\u201d can only mean he\u2019s doing<\/em> them: \u201cwhat is wanted is a kind of mental procedure which suddenly shifts gears, which throws everything in an inextricable tangle one floor higher\u201d (9). Indeed, in \u201cMetacommentary,\u201d he slow-walks us through this (dialectical) method that isn\u2019t named in advance, nor was there a reason for always tagging it in 1971, because \u201cdialectics\u201d was unfamiliar to the English-speaking readers of PMLA<\/em>, most of whom weren\u2019t following developments in French and German philosophy and theory, at least not both traditions with equal attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Jameson\u2019s own recollection in \u201cCriticism and Categories\u201d (2022) of the process of writing The Political Unconscious<\/em> back in 1980\u201381, most literary critics in the United States even then were unaware of what a synthesis of French and German thought could provide. So metacommentary it is, which is the first term Jameson supplied in his essay for understanding not only dialectics sous rature<\/em>, erased yet no less present, but what he would soon call the \u201cpolitical unconscious\u201d (with intimations already in \u201cMetacommentary\u201d [10, 17]) and even later \u201ccognitive mapping,\u201d each phrase picking out something specific about interpreting culture at different historical moments: in 1981 during the Thatcher and Reagan administrations and in 1991 deep into postmodernity and late capitalism. Put this way, we\u2019re struck by the impression that Jameson analyzed aspects of culture for which neither we nor he had yet any isms and names\u2014that the beauty of his long life is that he could think and write through numerous emergent circumstances where areas of thought and practice were coming into being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Links to the PMLA<\/em> archive:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jameson, Fredric. \u201cLa Cousine Bette<\/em> and Allegorical Realism<\/a>.\u201d PMLA<\/em>, vol. 86, no. 2, Mar. 1971, pp. 241\u201354.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014. \u201cCriticism and Categories<\/a>.\u201d PMLA<\/em>, vol. 137, no. 3, May 2022, pp. 563\u201367.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014. \u201cMetacommentary<\/a>.\u201d PMLA<\/em>, vol. 86, no. 1, Jan. 1971, pp. 9\u201318.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014. \u201cMarxist Criticism and Hegel<\/a>.\u201d PMLA<\/em>, vol. 131, no. 2, Mar. 2016, pp. 430\u201338.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014. \u201cWar and Representation<\/a>.\u201d PMLA<\/em>, vol. 124, no. 5, Oct. 2009, pp. 1532\u201347.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andrew Cole is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature in the Department of English at Princeton University. His next book is Being and Space<\/em>, the sequel to The Birth of Theory<\/em>. His guest column in the October 2024 issue of PMLA<\/em>, \u201cIn the Name of Metacommentary: Fredric Jameson,\u201d offers an extended reflection on the work Jameson published in the journal and beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our greatest thinker, Fredric Jameson, died on 22 September 2024 at the age of ninety. His example of socially meaningful interpretation\u2014indeed, his commitment to Marxism\u2014is fundamental, now more than ever. With writings spanning some six decades, he built up an immense critical foundation and edifice on every topic, every medium, that matters to the thinking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":823,"featured_media":60777,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4187],"tags":[2276,235,6816,6817,6815],"coauthors":[11364],"class_list":["post-60766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-humanities","category-literature","tag-humanities","tag-literature","tag-mla","tag-modern-language-association","tag-pmla"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/823"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60766"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60868,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60766\/revisions\/60868"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60766"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=60766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}