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Inventions of a Present

The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization

Fredric Jameson

$42.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English
Verso Books
03 September 2024
A novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the naïve reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation and, in the best and most intense cases, to propose a wholly new idea of what constitutes an event or of the very experience of living. The most interesting contemporary novels are those which try—and sometimes manage—to awaken our sense of a collectivity behind individual experience, revealing a relationship between the isolated subjectivity and a class or community. But even if this happens (which is rare), one must go on to find traces of collective praxis hidden away within the awakened feeling of inter-connection. And since it is in the sense of the nation and nationality that collectivity is most often expressed, there is an urgent need to disengage the possibilities of genuine action within these areas.

This sweeping collection of essays ranges from the elusive politics of North American literature to the sometimes frozen narrative experiences of the eastern countries and the Soviet Union and beyond. This is a voyage traversing the globe, discovering a common kinship between each literary destination in late capitalism itself.

By:  
Imprint:   Verso Books
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 234mm,  Width: 153mm, 
Weight:   428g
ISBN:   9781804292402
ISBN 10:   1804292400
Pages:   272
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.

Reviews for Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization

Fredric Jameson is America's leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction. -- Terry Eagleton Exploding like so many magnesium flares in the night sky, Fredric Jameson's writings have lit up the shrouded landscape of the postmodern. -- Perry Anderson Jameson has long been the most alluring American literary theorist, the only one to match the French in style and depth. -- Angela Woodward * Los Angeles Review of Books * Not often in American writing since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force. The best of Jameson's work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms. -- Benjamin Kunkel * London Review of Books * The most muscular of writers. * Times Literary Supplement * Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today. It can truly be said that nothing cultural is alien to him. -- Colin MacCabe Jameson thinks dialectically in the strong sense, in the way we are all supposed to think but almost no one does. -- Michael Wood * London Review of Books *


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