Jameson 1981

Reference:

Under construction

Review

Excerpts

'A social hermeneutic will ... wish to keep faith with its medieval precursor in just this respect, and must necessarily restore a perspective in which the imagery of libidinal revolution and of bodily transfiguration once again becomes a figure for the perfected community' (74).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | community | figure | hermeneutic | perspective |



'The present book, which rather seeks to argue the perspectives of Marxism as necessary preconditions for adequate literary comprehension. Marxist critical insights will therefore here be defended as something like an ultimate semantic precondition for the intelligibility of literary and cultural texts' (75).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | comprehension | literary |



'Semantic enrichment and enlargement of the inert givens and materials of a particular text must take place within three concentric frameworks, ... political history, ... tension and struggle between social classes ... and ... the sequence of modes of production and the succession and destiny of the various human social formations' (75).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | history | text |



'Our object of study will prove to be the ideologeme, that is, the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes' (76).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | collective | study |



'Both the individual text and its ideologemes know a final transformation, and must be read in terms of what I will call the ideology of form, that is, the symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of production' (76).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | form | ideology | sign | text |



'The strategic value of generic concepts for Marxism clearly lies in the mediatory function of the notion of a genre, which allows the coordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life' (105).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | analysis | diachronic | function | genre | history | notion | perspective | text | value |



'Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact' (106).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | function | literary | writer |



'Still, as texts free themselves more and more from an immediate performance situation, it becomes ever more difficult to enforce a given generic rule on their readers' (106).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | rule | situation |



'An ideologeme, that is, a historically determinate conceptual or semic complex which can project itself variously in the form of a "value system" or "philosophical concept," or in the form of a protonarrative, a private of collective narrative fantasy' (115).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | collective | concept | form | narrative | system | value |



'To limit ourselves to generic problems, what this model implies is that in its emergent, strong form a genre is essentially a socio-symbolic message, or in other terms, that form is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right' (140-1).

Domains: Under construction |

Key Terms: | emergent | form | genre | ideology |



Last Modified: July-12-96 9:50:54

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