The Gospel According to Jameson

Since Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Fredric Jameson has sought to use literary criticism to address the deepest questions of metaphysics and politics. His enterprise of using literary form as a way of approaching metaphysical questions becomes explicit in Marxism and Form, whose very title suggests the encompassing claims that he is making for his project. Jameson seeks to defend Marxist thought against the accusation and the danger of reductionism by showing that Marxism must come to terms with literary form and, in fact, that only Marxism can. Central to the work is the ethical and aesthetic problem posed by the authors studied: the problem of form itself — "form" in a qualitative sense — in modern art and literature and in modem life generally.