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Steven HelmlingProfessor The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique (SUNY Press 2001)The Success and Failure of Frederic Jameson is the first book to provide a critical overview of the work and career, as a whole, of the Marxist culture‑critic Fredric Jameson, foremost among American intellectuals and a vanguard figure in the theory movement of the past three decades. The book identifies major themes and traces both continuity and change in Jameson's engagement with the challenges presented by continental theory from the 1950s to the present. Instead of circumventing Jameson's notoriously difficult writing style, as commentators usually do, I take at face value Jameson's insistence that the success and failure of critique are conditioned on how it is written. Jameson insists on a "dialectical prose" that not merely analyzes but enacts or performs the contradictions of its subject matter, resulting in an agitating, dramatic, and compelling style that questions the very success or failure of critique itself. Style thus appears both as a salient feature of the writing, and as a problem for critical practice in general. Besides illuminating an oeuvre that's far from fully understood, the book hopes to enlarge the current "What was theory?" discussion.
Current Research I am currently completing T. W. Adorno and the Poetics of Critique, a study considering Adorno's "constellation," "immanent critique," "dialectical image" and the like not only as programs of critical method and purpose, but also as prescriptions for critical writing—as ways, in other words, that Adorno intends the writing of critique to enact the problems critique engages and the agons—"the labor and the suffering of the negative"—that critical labor imposes on the critic. The emphasis throughout is on Adorno's own writing, on the ways his notoriously (and self‑consciously) "difficult" prose enacts or performs the problematics it thematizes. The book argues that Adorno's "difficulty" instantiates a specifically modernist kind of writerly self‑consciousness, and reads (for example) his career-long difference with Lukács over "realism" versus "modernism" as not only about what sort of art to value or condemn—Mann or Beckett?—but also what sort of representational means are valid in the writing of critique itself. Likewise Adorno's attempt to redeem such Hegelian-and-Marxist terms as "dialectic," "contradiction," and "mediation" from what he regarded as their debasement in "official" Marxist discourse (in Lukacs, among others). In his writing practice, no less than in these positions, Adorno writes as a modernist, for whom the how of the writing is as important as the what.For more information, see the English Department's faculty profile for Steven Helmling. |
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