Attention fellow travelers, would-be radicals, curious culture vultures, and ABD English scholars!
Our friends at Verso Books—the publishing imprint behind such titans of theory as Edward Said, Mike Davis, Judith Butler, Norman Finkelstein, and Tariq Ali—have launched a new virtual reading group that is open to all. Their focus? The work and ideas of the late Fredric Jameson.
Jameson, a Marxist political theorist and iconoclastic literary scholar, left a large shadow when he died last fall. His many essays and interrogations considered science fiction, historiography, and Russian and French literature. But he is perhaps best known for honing a capacious theory of postmodernism, which he drew from a motley mess of cultural products.
Writing in Harper’s, the author Mark Greif claimed that everything from “…George Lucas films and Andy Warhol prints to hotel design and French theory,” went into the OG’s intellectual soup.
But for all its uses, that soup can be hard to swallow on one’s own. (Err, don’t dwell too hard on this metaphor.) Despite the great thinker’s storytelling prowess, Jameson’s line-level prose can be “forbidding and unforgiving” for us layfolk. And though he occupied an interesting position in the academy as something of a reluctant public intellectual, the doorstop mega-texts—like Postmodern: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism—require deciphering. Thus the benefit of a book club.
According to the Verso blog, each month the Jameson Reading Group “selects a key text or problematic from Fredric Jameson’s work and reads about 100 pages together.” Then the group meets on Zoom, where a scholar, writer, or other relevant Jameson thinker offers framing remarks.
Previous meetings have centered around key texts like A Singular Modernity, and Archaeologies of the Future. Guests have included scholars like Anna Kornbluh and Alberto Toscano. But one can jump in at any time.
As someone who’s long been theory-curious but lacked the confidence (and um, interpretive skills) that can come with a higher degree, the idea of the group reading club is pretty appealing. And I don’t think I stand alone. Some of your favorite literary stackers have been muddling through Postmodernism, too.
And as Bruce Robbins recalled in a fine remembrance for The Baffler, Jameson’s own “personal impulses ran more toward the nurturing of small alternative spaces.” Because even brainiacs need buddies.
The group’s next meeting is on February 23rd at 2PM EST. You can sign up here.
Curious but not sold? An edited recording of the first session is available here.
