Fredric Jameson, Critic Who Linked Literature to Capitalism, Dies at 90

Among the world’s leading academic critics, he brought his analytical rigor to topics as diverse as German opera and sci-fi movies.

Fredric Jameson, who held sway as one of the world’s leading literary theorists for over 40 years, bringing his brand of rigorous, incisive Marxist criticism to topics as broad as German opera, sci-fi films and luxury hotel design, died on Sunday at his home in Killingworth, Conn. He was 90.

His daughter Charlotte Jameson announced the death in a statement but did not give the cause.

For decades, Mr. Jameson’s voluminous work — more than 30 books and edited collections as well as reams of journal articles — has been required reading for graduate students (and some precocious undergraduates), not just in literature but also in film studies, architecture and history.

Though he was very much an academic writer and never achieved the level of public awareness attained by some of his literary-theory confreres, like Slavoj Zizek and Harold Bloom, his work was as influential as theirs, if not more so.

Mr. Jameson, who spent much of his career as a professor at Duke University, was best known for two singular achievements, either of which would mark a scholar for intellectual immortality.

First, starting in the early 1970s, he led the effort to import into American circles the critical perspectives of Western Marxism — a diverse set of ideas, popular in France and Germany, arranged around the notion that culture was closely related to a society’s economic base, though not completely constrained by it.

Mr. Jameson brought that analysis, formulated in the industrialized first half of the 20th century, into the globalizing, technology-driven second half, a period in which the deepening reach of capitalism into everyday culture was both dizzying and anesthetizing.

“We are henceforth so far removed from the realities of production and work on the world that we inhabit a dream world of artificial stimuli and televised experience,” he wrote in “Marxism and Form” (1971).

He summarized much of this work in his 1981 book, “The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act,” in which he showed how the history of narrative forms, from the Homeric epic to the modern novel, had been shaped by the evolution of capitalism, and how those forms both illuminated and obfuscated capitalist structures.

Then, in the mid-1980s, he used that same arsenal of ideas to confront his second challenge: a critique of postmodernism, which, beginning in the 1970s, had taken hold in academic departments to describe what many saw as the breakdown of grand narratives about history, culture and society.

In response, Mr. Jameson argued that postmodernism was itself just one more grand narrative, albeit one that tried to disguise its own status.

For that reason he didn’t dismiss postmodernism out of hand: In “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1991), he concluded “that the postmodern is as unusual as it thinks it is, and that it constitutes a cultural and experiential break worth exploring in greater detail.”

His aim in that book, and many that followed, was to historicize postmodernism, to show how it functioned within the broader context of late-stage capitalism, just as earlier Marxist scholars argued that modernism was in large part a function of the industrial age.

Postmodernism, he said, was special in that it signified the commoditization of culture itself, replacing history and progressive visions with irony, cynicism and pastiche, or mixing and matching cultural artifacts and forms without respect to their historical contexts.

It meant, he wrote in “The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998,” published in 1998, that “our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and a perpetual change that obliterates tradition.”

Modernism, he posited, had existed in opposition to the reigning economic and cultural structures of its time. But what about postmodernism? Could it also offer points of resistance, even as it represented a more complete takeover of daily life by consumer capitalism? He was unsure.

“That,” he wrote, “is a question that we must leave open.”

Mr. Jameson’s dense, intricate prose was not for the faint of heart, and even committed readers sometimes found it rough going: He twice won the annual Bad Writing Contest, presented by the journal Philosophy and Literature.

But his frequent, enjoyable insights into pop culture made the effort worth it for some readers. In “The Cultural Turn,” for example, he argued convincingly that “Star Wars” was a nostalgia film, aimed at satisfying longings among baby boomers for the sci-fi serials of their youth.

Ever productive, he continued to churn out works — his most recent book, “Inventions of a Present: The Novel in Its Crisis of Globalization,” appeared in May, and another, “The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present,” is due in October.

And while he never loosened his prose to appeal to a broader audience, Mr. Jameson did make increasing forays into writing for more general, if still learned, readers. That included 17 articles for The London Review of Books between 1994 and 2022 in which he tackled contemporary writers like Margaret Atwood and Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Fredric Ruff Jameson was born on April 14, 1934, in Cleveland. His father, Frank Jameson, was a doctor, and his mother, Bernice (Ruff) Jameson, oversaw the home.

He graduated with a degree in English from Haverford College in Pennsylvania in 1954 and then went traveling in Europe, where he first encountered Western Marxist theory. He returned after a year to pursue a Ph.D. in literature from Yale; he graduated in 1959 with a dissertation on the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

Mr. Jameson taught at Harvard; the University of California, San Diego; Yale; and the University of California, Santa Cruz, before arriving at Duke in 1985. He remained on its faculty at his death.

Along with his daughter Charlotte, his survivors include his wife, Susan Willis, and two other daughters, Jennifer and Cassie.

Because of his productivity and originality, Mr. Jameson’s body of work maps the evolution not only of his own thinking but also of capitalist society in recent decades — from the dawn of neoliberal globalization in the 1970s through the collapse of the Soviet Union to the distance-obliterating dominance of the internet, all of which, he argued, could best be understood through the way those changes shaped literature and culture.

And he continued to insist that even as global capitalism reduced humans to their likes and tweets and online purchases, people also possessed the tools of their own liberation.

“It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism,” he wrote in “The Seeds of Time” (1994). “Perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.”