A collection of interviews with Fredric Jameson over a 20 year period

Fredric Jameson is one of the most influential literary and cultural critics writing today. He is a theoretical innovator whose ideas about the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences. Bringing together ten interviews conducted between 1982 and 2005, Jameson on Jameson is a compellingly candid introduction to his thought for those new to it, and a rich source of illumination and clarification for those seeking deeper understanding. Jameson discusses his intellectual and political preoccupations, most prominently his commitment to Marxism as a way of critiquing capitalism and the culture it has engendered. He explains many of his key concepts, including postmodernism, the dialectic, metacommentary, the political unconscious, the utopian, cognitive mapping, and spatialization.

Jameson on Jameson displays Jameson’s extraordinary grasp of contemporary culture—architecture, art, cinema, literature, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and urban geography—as well as the challenge that the geographic reach of his thinking poses to the Eurocentricity of the West. Conducted by accomplished scholars from United States, Egypt, Korea, China, Sweden, and England, the interviews elicit Jameson’s reflections on the broad international significance of his ideas and their applicability and implications in different cultural and political contexts, including the present phase of globalization.

The volume includes an introduction by Jameson and a comprehensive bibliography of his publications in all languages.

Interviewers
Mona Abousenna
Abbas Al-Tonsi
Srinivas Aravamudan
Jonathan Culler
Sara Danius
Leonard Green
Sabry Hafez
Stuart Hall
Stefan Jonsson
Ranjana Khanna
Richard Klein
Horacio Machin
Paik Nak-chung
Michael Speaks
Anders Stephanson
Xudong Zhang

"“Fredric Jameson may well be the greatest intellectual produced by the United States in the last half century. It is difficult to think of anyone else who has made as many, as lasting, and as wide- ranging contributions as Jameson. . . . The present collection of interviews from 1981 to the present, then, stands as a welcome commentary on Jameson’s vast work and an important reflection of the changes in American intellectual life in the period from the last days of the Cold War to the end of the second Bush administration.”" - Intertexts

"“Jameson . . . well known for the amazing variety of subjects he discusses. The many readers who find his style hard to grasp will find considerable help in this collection. . . . The book makes his key concepts accessible. . . . Recommended for literary and cultural criticism collections.”" - Library Journal