Tribute to Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) was a longtime friend of the minnesota review. His contributions reflect his position as a Marxist who cared about style, which left him at odds with many prominent Marxists, and as a cultural theorist who cared about material conditions in a way that left him at odds with many cultural theorists. In 1974, this journal published a review essay by Jameson, “Benjamin as Historian, or How to Write a Marxist Literary History,” in which he discusses newly translated books on Baudelaire and Brecht by Walter Benjamin. The review broaches aesthetic and political themes that Jameson was still discussing in the seminar that I took with him as a graduate student at Duke in the early 1990s, by which time Benjamin had become a canonical figure in literary and cultural studies, thanks at least in part to Jameson's influence. The same journal issue includes a review of The Prison-House of Language (Purdy 1974). Jameson guest-edited two “special supplement” sections of the minnesota review in collaboration with the Marxist Literary Group, founded by him and his students at the University of California, San Diego. The first of these essay clusters, “The Marxist Alternative to the Traditions” (Jameson 1975a), begins with an introduction entitled “Notes toward a Marxist Cultural Politics,” in which Jameson situates Marxist literary analysis within the larger social and political “situation” for Marxist intellectuals in the mid-1970s, after McCarthyism and the end of the Vietnam War. The essays thus introduced combine literary analysis with topics as diverse as social action, African American literature, dependency theory in Latin America, sexual economics, cinema, and Chinese aesthetics—a range that reflects Jameson's broad view of academic Marxism. These essays, writes Jameson (1975b: 35), “provide a selection of the kinds of Marxist literary analysis practiced today” and, in some cases, provide the authors’ “defense of their own versions of Marxist literary method.” Enabling and encouraging other leftist intellectuals to pursue their own versions of the tradition is one of Jameson's legacies, praised by many who have written about his passing. The second minnesota review supplement he edited, “Marxism and Utopia” (Jameson 1976), opens up a conversation on a theme that is revisited in a more recent special issue of the minnesota review, guest-edited by board member Philip Wegner (2016). The journal published at least two additional texts by Jameson (1982, 1984) as well as an interview with Maria Elisa Cevasco (2012). Jameson's work is frequently commented on and cited in the minnesota review, which aspires to continue serving as a space for writing that engages both aesthetics and material conditions, as he himself practiced, championed, and encouraged.