"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."
R.I.P., Fredric Jameson 1934-2024
