Signs the Book You're Reading is a Revised Dissertation and/or Vintage '70s Fredric Jameson

1. It is titled or subtitled The _____ Imagination.
2. Its footnotes reference every single piece of secondary literature on a given subject.
3. The distinction between "high" and "low" literature relies not on any intrinsic feature of the work but on whether or not it was intended to be read by a disciplined bourgeois audience.
4. Claude Levi-Strauss reminds its author to do many things, which he enumerates in grueling detail.
5. Within the first two pages, the author trots out a classic of American Studies, like Constance Rourke's American Humor: A Study of National Character (1933), for the express purpose of bemoaning its naively undeconstructed use of oxymorons like "acting naturally" or "realist performance."
6. Peter Brooks' The Melodramatic Imagination is cited favorably before its argument suffers a violent death-by-uncharitable-rehearsal.
7. The Algirdas Greimas Orchestra keeps you swinging in a semiotic square "Early in the Morning & Late at Nite."
8. The author implores his readers to do their best 19th century German philologist and scrutinize comprehensively the entire historical record, from the fall of the Roman Empire to last week's raucous orgy in the penthouse of the Bellagio ... while presenting little evidence that he has done so himself.

Comments

[Sisyphus]

Are we subverting the social system, only to have it contained in the end? Seems that everyone's always doing that these days, to the beat of the Bakhtin jazz combo, not of the Greimas orchestra (who produce square, not round, LPs).

Hmm, has someone written The (Fredric) Jamesonian Imagination already? http://www.jamesonwhiskey.com/>The Imagination of Jameson's is waaaay different though; I wouldn't be the one to write that one as I'm on the wine tonight myself.

[ben wolfson]

Innumeration is when you memorize a list.

[Miriam]

No, no--not the semiotic square dance!

Was capital fashionably late?

(Er--#2 resembles my current footnotes...)

[Tim Lacy]

Slapping around Dr. Jameson in this way is giving me second thoughts about using the loosely related term "dreams" in my new diss-to-book working title. - TL

[JPool]

I haven't read any Jameson since the 1990s and I figured that since I'm historian I don't have to. But I've also got a chapter whose current working title includes "... and the Late Colonial Imagination." Fuck. (I'm also busy engaging with Anderson and Chatterjee there. Does that help at all, or just underlines the ammount of 20-30 year old material?)

Also, are lit students still letting Levi-Strauss boss them around? Thank god I've stopped having to read meaningless and arbitrary tables.

[Luther Blissett]

There are worse critical handmaidens than Jameson and Levi-Strauss. *Marxism and Form*, *The Political Unconscious*, and *Postmodernism* are brilliant critical works -- and with stunning close readings and an attention to prose style missing in most criticism today.

And aren't nearly all first books revised dissertations?

[Scott McLemee]

There is indeed a book called http://www.mclemee.com/id37.html "> The Jamesonian Unconscious.

[Sisyphus]

There is indeed a book called The Jamesonian Unconscious.

Aha! I liked your list. Sounds like the book didn't have nearly enough drinking in it though.

4. ALSO unexamined: Late Marxism, Jameson's book on Theodor Adorno -- a Marxist cultural critic far more dense, brilliant, and labyrinthine than even Jameson himself. (The experience of reading Late Marxism might be compared to what one imagines entering a black hole to be like.)

I read that!!! It was the only Jameson book _not_ checked out of our library so I grabbed it back when I felt I needed to know more Jameson. The effect on my mind was like hosing off concrete --- very forceful, powerful, and yet after fifteen minutes it all evaporated away, leaving no sign of having been there.