Periodizing Jameson

For a half century, the American intellectual Fredric Jameson has been a driving force in literary and cultural theory. In Periodizing Jameson, Phillip E. Wegner builds upon Jamesons unique dialectical method to demonstrate the value of Jamesons toolsperiodization, the fourfold hermeneutic, and the Greimasian semiotic square, among othersand to develop virtuoso readings of Jamesons own work and the history of the contemporary American university in which it unfolds. Wegner shows how Jamesons work intervenes in particular social, cultural, and political situations, using his scholarship both to develop original explorations of nineteenth-century fiction, popular films, and other prominent theorists, and to examine the changing fortunes of theory itself. In this way, Periodizing Jameson casts new light on the potential of and challenges to humanist intellectual work in the present.