"If some theory had revolutionary implications, it was because it pressed
that soulless logic through to the humanities themselves. They were no
longer to be seen as a preserve of personal value and spiritual insight
in a crassly utilitarian world. On the contrary, you could take a work
of art and show how it was governed by certain underlying codes and
systems, deep narrative structures, ideological interests or the play of
unconscious forces, of which the work itself was innocently unaware.
The elusive spirit of the human could be reduced to the product of
impersonal forces. What an otherwise diverse body of theories had in
common was their anti-empiricism – the conviction that the truth of a
literary work was not the way it spontaneously appeared. What you saw
was not what you got."
"For the liberal humanists who presided over literary studies, literature
was the home of the intimate and irreducible, the stray gesture and
sensuous particular, of everything that held out against a world of
bureaucratic states and transnational corporations. The phrase ‘literary
theory’ seemed a contradiction in terms: how could one deal abstractly
with the tone or mood or texture of a poem? Literature was the last
refuge of personal experience and the individual spirit, as well as a
form of creative transcendence that had long since stood in for a failed
religion. If all this were to be unmasked as an effect of the signifier
or the ruses of desire, there really was nowhere else to turn."
"Theory represented a new configuration of knowledge, appropriate to an
age in which the boundaries between traditional academic subjects were
crumbling and most of the exciting work was being done in the
borderlands between them. Literary criticism had been tightly focused on
the isolated text, in a defence of high culture against a barbarian
world, but was now flung open to a much wider field of inquiry.
Jameson’s academic field was literature, but there is little about poets
and novelists in The Years of Theory
compared with philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis and
so on. The book is thus likely to confirm the prejudice that theory
supplants the literary work rather than enriches it. In fact, it
confirms the view that criticism can flourish only by reaching beyond
its traditional confines, losing one kind of identity in order to
discover another."
The Excitement of the Stuff
R.I.P., Fredric Jameson 1934-2024
