Home Feed
Home
Search
Search
Add Review, Blurb, Quote
Add
Activity
Activity
Profile
Profile
The Political Unconscious
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act | Fredric Jameson
13 posts | 2 read | 1 reading
Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. He asserts the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts, claiming it to be at the center of all reading and understanding, not just a supplement or auxiliary to other methods current today. Jameson supports his thesis by looking closely at the nature of interpretation. Our understanding, he says, is colored by the concepts and categories that we inherit from our culture's interpretive tradition and that we use to comprehend what we read. How then can the literature of other ages be understood by readers from a present that is culturally so different from the past? Marxism lies at the foundation of Jameson's answer, because it conceives of history as a single collective narrative that links past and present; Marxist literary criticism reveals the unity of that uninterrupted narrative. Jameson applies his interpretive theory to nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, including the works of Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad. Throughout, he considers other interpretive approaches to the works he discusses, assessing the importance and limitations of methods as different as Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, dialectical analysis, and allegorical readings. The book as a whole raises directly issues that have been only implicit in Jameson's earlier work, namely the relationship between dialectics and structuralism, and the tension between the German and the French aesthetic traditions.
Amazon Indiebound Barnes and Noble WorldCat Goodreads LibraryThing
Pick icon
100%
blurb
annamatopoetry
post image

reading Marxist theory to avoid reading Hamnet, and it's Dense but interesting. I've never read Althusser so that doesn't help, but we're on page 32 and, I believe, have gotten past the worst of it.

quote
annamatopoetry
post image

"It does little good, in other words, to banish 'extrinsic' categories from our thinking when the latter continues to have a hold on the objective realities about which we plan to think."

annamatopoetry such as a loud ass bitch street canvassing (sidenote: for what doesn't matter, I hate all street canvassers, aka "binder people" as I used to refer to them before ipads, unilaterally) being so FUCKING LOUD that I couldn't read my book without having my music on max volume and mouthing each word. was thisclose to murder. 3y
1 like1 comment
review
Taylor
post image
Pickpick

A challenging but illuminating read. I could never read more than two or three pages a day, though that was a good pace for me. Jameson is a BIG thinker, and throws around concepts that I was mostly unfamiliar with. This resulted in lots of trips to YouTube to learn assorted philosophy terms. I continuously was getting more wisdom—sometimes having to relearn definitions multiple times. This didn‘t bug me though, and I‘ve come out much smarter.

quote
Taylor

it is increasingly clear in today‘s world (if it had ever been in doubt) that a Left which cannot grasp the immense Utopian appeal of nationalism (any more than it can grasp that of religion or of fascism) can scarcely hope to “reappropriate” such collective energies and must effectively doom itself to political impotence.

🔥

quote
Taylor

[T]here is a sense in which such faithful “expression” of the underlying logic of the daily life of capitalism programs us to it and helps to make us increasingly at home in what would otherwise—for a time traveler from another social formation—be a distressingly alienating reality.

quote
Taylor

The dialectic of desire is thus in Gissing something like the negation of a negation. Since his characters never reach the point of being in a position to desire, it is as though the whole system of success and failure has been undermined from the outset....

blurb
annamatopoetry
post image

1) The Political Unconscious, tagged. Also realized I'm technically still reading Sakhalin Island and have been since 2017.
2) Talk on the Wild Side, okay, just reviewed
3) not numerical, but I have a list I may post if I either find a better image editor or can be arsed to open photoshop on my computer.
#weekendreads @rachelsbrittain

quote
Taylor

“structural analysis demands as its completion a kind of negative reconstruction, a postulation by implication and presupposition, of an absent or unrepresentable infrastructural limiting system.”

No clue what an “infrastructural limiting system” is...but I like it.

Reggie ? Where‘s the over my head emoji? 3y
Tanisha_A @Reggie Same! 😂 3y
Taylor @Reggie Lol no kidding. 3y
4 likes3 comments
blurb
annamatopoetry
post image

you guys this is going to involve Effort. deep breath. I have a degree in philosophy, I can do this. and it's written in English, not translated, so that helps.

quote
Taylor

The notion of overlapping modes of production outlined above has indeed the advantage of allowing us to short-circuit the false problem of the priority of the economic over the sexual, or of sexual oppression over that of social class.

quote
Taylor

If everything were transparent, then no ideology would be possible, and no domination either: evidently that is not our case.

blurb
Taylor

Really difficult book that I grabbed because it was on display at the bookstore. I may have gotten a bit over my head with this one. I am though quite proud of myself for making it fifty pages so far. I decided I‘m gonna read at least one or two pages a day, to stay with it. It‘s excellent, but just...a lot of work.

batsy That's my experience with Jameson, who I've only read in bits. Excellent, but very theoretically dense and I'm often somewhat out of my depth. 3y
Taylor @batsy Yeah, I‘m constantly having to look up terms he uses just to know what he‘s talking about. It‘s definitely written for people who are familiarized with philosophy and Marxism theory, or something. 3y
3 likes2 comments
blurb
annamatopoetry
post image

Won some sort of christmas book gift jackpot this year. I think I got everything on my list??