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.
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