Fredric Jameson's Metaphysics of History

Abstract: This essay presents an overview of Jameson's project. It thinks of him as a metaphysical historicist whose work shares something with earlier philosophers of Totality, such as, in particular, F. H. Bradley, the late English Hegelian. This matters because the critique of Bradley's metaphysics was a precondition for the emergence of both Russell and Wittgenstein's modern analytic philosophy and the modern literary criticism that developed around 1920 with T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards. Jameson barely engages with either of these linked traditions, and this essay argues that that omission is a problem for him. The essay offers a practical example how this problem affects Jameson's work by a short analysis of his reading of George Eliot's Romola in The Antinomies of Realism .