Hearing Our Contemporaries: Jameson's Years of Theory and Criticism

Abstract: Fredric Jameson published two new books in 2024, the year of his untimely death, each rather different from his earlier ones. Inventions of a Present is a collection of a number of review essays on novels published, for the most part, in the 21st century. The Years of Theory is based on the edited transcripts of a graduate seminar on postwar French thought. Hence, on display here is Jameson-the-reader and Jameson-the-teacher, roles that characterize Jameson's entire body of work. As Robert T. Tally Jr. discusses in this article, these texts are at once outliers in Jameson's overall corpus while also taking part in his overall project, which was remarkably consistent over a 65-year career. Tally argues that these books and this career should be understood as part of a larger, continuous exploration of the ontology of the present, an ongoing critical project that Jameson's vast oeuvre may continue to inform and empower.