TY - BOOK AU - Jameson, Fredric TI - MARXISM AND FORM : Twentieth - Century Dialectical Theories of Literature SN - 9780691013114 U1 - 801.950904 PY - 1974////01/01 CY - New Jersey PB - Princeton University Press KW - Marxist criticism KW - Marxist Literary Cricism KW - Dialectical materialism KW - Dialectical Theories KW - Marxism- Literature KW - Literature- Criticism- 20th Century KW - Literature- Criticism KW - Dialectical Criticism KW - Literary Theory and Criticism KW - European Marxist theorists KW - Marxism and Aesthetics N1 - For more than thirty years, Fredric Jameson has been one of the most productive, wide-ranging, and distinctive literary theorists in the United States and the Anglophone world. Marxism and Form provided a pioneering account of the work of the major European Marxist theorists--T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Georg Luk cs, and Jean-Paul Sartre--work that was, at the time, largely neglected in the English-speaking world. Through penetrating readings of each theorist, Jameson developed a critical mode of engagement that has had tremendous influence. He provided a framework for analyzing the connection between art and the historical circumstances of its making--in particular, how cultural artifacts distort, repress, or transform their circumstances through the abstractions of aesthetic form. Jameson's presentation of the critical thought of this Hegelian Marxism provided a stark alternative to the Anglo-American tradition of empiricism and humanism. It would later provide a compelling alternative to poststructuralism and deconstruction as they became dominant methodologies in aesthetic criticism. One year after Marxism and Form, Princeton published Jameson's "The Prison-House of Language" (1972), which provided a thorough historical and philosophical description of formalism and structuralism. Both books remain central to Jameson's main intellectual legacy: describing and extending a tradition of Western Marxism in cultural theory and literary interpretation; T.W. Adorno; or, historical tropes Versions of a Marxist Hermeneutic. I. Watler Benjamin; or, nostalgia II. Marcuse and Schiller III. Ernst Bloch and the future The case for Georg Lukács Sartre and history Towards dialectical criticism ER -