Ian Buchanan (ed.): Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (2007)

Fredric Jameson is one of the most influential literary and cultural critics writing today. He is a theoretical innovator whose ideas about the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences. Bringing together ten interviews conducted between 1982 and 2005, Jameson on Jameson is a compellingly candid introduction to his thought for those new to it, and a rich source of illumination and clarification for those seeking deeper understanding. Jameson discusses his intellectual and political preoccupations, most prominently his commitment to Marxism as a way of critiquing capitalism and the culture it has engendered. He explains many of his key concepts, including postmodernism, the dialectic, metacommentary, the political unconscious, the utopian, cognitive mapping, and spatialization.

Jameson on Jameson displays Jameson’s extraordinary grasp of contemporary culture—architecture, art, cinema, literature, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and urban geography—as well as the challenge that the geographic reach of his thinking poses to the Eurocentricity of the West. Conducted by accomplished scholars from United States, Egypt, Korea, China, Sweden, and England, the interviews elicit Jameson’s reflections on the broad international significance of his ideas and their applicability and implications in different cultural and political contexts, including the present phase of globalization.
The volume includes an introduction by Jameson and a comprehensive bibliography of his publications in all languages.

Interviewers: Mona Abousenna, Abbas Al-Tonsi, Srinivas Aravamudan, Jonathan Culler, Sara Danius, Leonard Green, Sabry Hafez, Stuart Hall, Stefan Jonsson, Ranjana Khanna, Richard Klein, Horacio Machin, Paik Nak-chung, Michael Speaks, Anders Stephanson, Xudong Zhang

Publisher Duke University Press, 2007
Post-Contemporary Interventions series
ISBN 0822340879, 9780822340874
296 pages

publisher
google books

PDF

Sianne Ngai: Ugly Feelings (2005)

“Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity.

Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening.

Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.”

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2005
ISBN 0674015363, 9780674015364
viii+422 pages

Reviews: Jennifer L. Fleissner (Modernism/modernity, 2006), Jennifer Greiman (Leviathan, 2012), Eu Jin Chua (Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, 2007), Dina Mendonça (Metapsychology, 2005).

Interview with author (Adam Jasper, Cabinet)
Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2018-5-23)

Simon Biggs (ed.): Remediating the Social (2012)

“The Remediating the Social book includes full proceedings of next week’s conference “Electronic Literature as a Model for Creativity and Innovation in Practice” in Edinburgh, including full texts of essays and full color artist’s pages with documentation of works commissioned for the Remediating the Social exhibition.”

Publisher University of Bergen, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, Bergen, Norway
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
ISBN 97882999089-0-0
158 pages

Conference
Publisher

PDF
PDF (screen version)