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Fredric Jameson

Fredric Jameson (born April 14, 1934) is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)[3] and The Political Unconscious (1981).

Fredric Jameson
Born (1934-04-14) April 14, 1934 (age 89)
Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Alma materHaverford College
Yale University
Era20th-/21st-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolWestern Marxism
Marxist hermeneutics[1]
Main interests
Marxist literary criticism · Marxist cultural analysis · Postmodernism · modernism · science fiction · utopia · history · narrative · cultural studies · dialectics · structuralism
Notable ideas
Cognitive mapping · national allegory · political unconscious

Jameson is the Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of Romance Studies (French), and Director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University.[4] In 2012, the Modern Language Association gave Jameson its sixth Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement.[5]

Life and works edit

Jameson was born in Cleveland, Ohio,[6] and graduated in 1950 from Moorestown Friends School.[7]

After graduating in 1954 from Haverford College, where his professors included Wayne Booth,[8] he briefly traveled to Europe, studying at Aix-en-Provence, Munich, and Berlin, where he learned of new developments in continental philosophy, including the rise of structuralism. He returned to America the following year to pursue a doctoral degree at Yale University, where he studied under Erich Auerbach.

Early works edit

Auerbach would prove to be a lasting influence on Jameson's thought. This was already apparent in Jameson's doctoral dissertation, published in 1961 as Sartre: the Origins of a Style. Auerbach's concerns were rooted in the German philological tradition; his works on the history of style analyzed literary form within social history. Jameson would follow in these steps, examining the articulation of poetry, history, philology, and philosophy in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Jameson's work focused on the relation between the style of Sartre's writings and the political and ethical positions of his existentialist philosophy. The occasional Marxian aspects of Sartre's work were glossed over in this book; Jameson would return to them in the following decade.[9]: 29–30 

Jameson's dissertation, though it drew on a long tradition of European cultural analysis, differed markedly from the prevailing trends of Anglo-American academia (which were empiricism and logical positivism in philosophy and linguistics, and New Critical formalism in literary criticism). It nevertheless earned Jameson a position at Harvard University, where he taught during the first half of the 1960s.

Research into Marxism edit

His interest in Sartre led Jameson to intense study of Marxist literary theory. Even though Karl Marx was becoming an important influence in American social science, partly through the influence of the many European intellectuals who had sought refuge from the Second World War in the United States, such as Theodor Adorno, the literary and critical work of the Western Marxists was still largely unknown in American academia in the late-1950s and early-1960s.[9]: 120 

Jameson's shift toward Marxism was also driven by his increasing political connection with the New Left and pacifist movements, as well as by the Cuban Revolution, which Jameson took as a sign that "Marxism was alive and well as a collective movement and a culturally productive force".[10] His research focused on critical theory: thinkers of, and influenced by, the Frankfurt School, such as Kenneth Burke, György Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser, and Sartre, who viewed cultural criticism as an integral feature of Marxist theory. In 1969, Jameson co-founded the Marxist Literary Group with a number of his graduate students at the University of California, San Diego.[11]

While the Orthodox Marxist view of ideology held that the cultural "superstructure" was completely determined by the economic "base", the Western Marxists critically analyzed culture as a historical and social phenomenon alongside economic production and distribution or political power relationships. They held that culture must be studied using the Hegelian concept of immanent critique: the theory that adequate description and criticism of a philosophical or cultural text must be carried out in the same terms that text itself employs, in order to develop its internal inconsistencies in a manner that allows intellectual advancement. Marx highlighted immanent critique in his early writings, derived from Hegel's development of a new form of dialectical thinking that would attempt, as Jameson comments, "to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps".[12]

Narrative and history edit

History came to play an increasingly central role in Jameson's interpretation of both the reading (consumption) and writing (production) of literary texts. Jameson marked his full-fledged commitment to Hegelian-Marxist philosophy with the publication of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, the opening slogan of which is "always historicize" (1981). The Political Unconscious takes as its object not the literary text itself, but rather the interpretive frameworks by which it is now constructed. It emerges as a manifesto for new activity concerning literary narrative.

The book's argument emphasized history as the "ultimate horizon" of literary and cultural analysis. It borrowed notions from the structuralist tradition and from Raymond Williams's work in cultural studies, and joined them to a largely Marxist view of labor (whether blue-collar or intellectual) as the focal point of analysis. Jameson's readings exploited both the explicit formal and thematic choices of the writer and the unconscious framework guiding these. Artistic choices that were ordinarily viewed in purely aesthetic terms were recast in terms of historical literary practices and norms, in an attempt to develop a systematic inventory of the constraints they imposed on the artist as an individual creative subject. To further this meta-commentary, Jameson described the ideologeme, or "the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes", the smallest legible residue of the real-life, ongoing struggles occurring between social classes.[13] (The term "ideologeme" was first used by Mikhail Bakhtin and Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev in their work The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship and was later popularised by Julia Kristeva. Kristeva defined it as "the intersection of a given textual arrangement ... with the utterances ... that it either assimilates into its own space or to which it refers in the space of exterior texts ...".[14])

Jameson's establishment of history as the only pertinent factor in this analysis, which derived the categories governing artistic production from their historical framework, was paired with a bold theoretical claim. His book claimed to establish Marxian literary criticism, centered in the notion of an artistic mode of production, as the most all-inclusive and comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding literature.[15] According to Vincent B. Leitch, the publication of The Political Unconscious "rendered Jameson the leading Marxist literary critic in America."[16]

Critique of postmodernism edit

In 1984, during his tenure as Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Jameson published an article titled "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" in the journal New Left Review. This controversial article, which Jameson later expanded into a book, was part of a series of analyses of postmodernism from the dialectical perspective Jameson had developed in his earlier work on narrative. Jameson viewed the postmodern "skepticism towards metanarratives" as a "mode of experience" stemming from the conditions of intellectual labor imposed by the late capitalist mode of production.[further explanation needed]

Postmodernists claimed that the complex differentiation between "spheres" or fields of life (such as the political, the social, the cultural, the commercial), and between distinct social classes and roles within each field, had been overcome by the crisis of foundationalism and the consequent relativization of truth-claims. Jameson argued against this, asserting that these phenomena had or could have been understood successfully within a modernist framework; the postmodern failure to achieve this understanding implied an abrupt break in the dialectical refinement of thought.[citation needed]

In his view, postmodernity's merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated whole was the result of the colonization of the cultural sphere, which had retained at least partial autonomy during the prior modernist era, by a newly organized corporate capitalism. Following Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the culture industry, Jameson discussed this phenomenon in his critical discussion of architecture, film, narrative, and visual arts, as well as in his strictly philosophical work.

Two of Jameson's best-known claims from Postmodernism are that postmodernity is characterized by pastiche and a crisis in historicity. Jameson argued that parody (which implies a moral judgment or a comparison with societal norms) was replaced by pastiche (collage and other forms of juxtaposition without a normative grounding). Relatedly, Jameson argued that the postmodern era suffers from a crisis in historicity: "there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the American history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current, multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life".[17]

Jameson's analysis of postmodernism attempted to view it as historically grounded; he therefore explicitly rejected any moralistic opposition to postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon, and continued to insist upon a Hegelian immanent critique that would "think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together".[18] His refusal to simply dismiss postmodernism from the onset, however, was misinterpreted by some Marxist intellectuals as an implicit endorsement of postmodern views.

Recent work edit

Jameson's later writings include Archaeologies of the Future, a study of utopia and science fiction, launched at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, in December 2005, and The Modernist Papers (2007), a collection of essays on modernism that is meant to accompany the theoretical A Singular Modernity (2002) as a "source-book". These books, along with Postmodernism and The Antinomies of Realism (2013),[19] form part of an ongoing study entitled The Poetics of Social Forms, which attempts, in Sara Danius's words, to "provide a general history of aesthetic forms, at the same time seeking to show how this history can be read in tandem with a history of social and economic formations".[20] As of 2010, Jameson intends to supplement the already published volumes of The Poetics of Social Forms with a study of allegory entitled Overtones: The Harmonics of Allegory.[21] The Antinomies of Realism won the 2014 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.[22]

Alongside this continuing project, he has recently published three related studies of dialectical theory: Valences of the Dialectic (2009), which includes Jameson's critical responses to Slavoj Žižek, Gilles Deleuze, and other contemporary theorists; The Hegel Variations (2010), a commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit; and Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (2011), an analysis of Marx's Das Kapital.

An overview of Jameson's work, Fredric Jameson: Live Theory, by Ian Buchanan, was published in 2007.

Holberg International Memorial Prize edit

In 2008, Jameson was awarded the annual Holberg International Memorial Prize in recognition of his career-long research "on the relation between social formations and cultural forms".[23] The prize, which was worth 4.6 million kr (approximately $648,000), was presented to Jameson by Tora Aasland, Norwegian Minister of Education and Research, in Bergen, Norway, on 26 November 2008.[24]

Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award edit

In 2009, Jameson was awarded the Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award by the North American Society for Utopian Studies.

Influence in China edit

Jameson has had an influence on the theorization of the postmodern in China. In mid-1985, shortly after the beginning of the cultural fever (early 1985 to June Fourth, 1989)—a period in Chinese intellectual history characterized in part by intense interest in Western critical theory, literary theory, and related disciplines[25]—Jameson discussed the idea of postmodernism in China in lectures at Peking University and the newly founded Shenzhen University.[26][27] Jameson's ideas as presented at Peking University had an impact on some students, including Zhang Yiwu and Zhang Xudong, scholars whose work would come to play an important role in the analysis of postmodernity in China.[28] In 1987 Jameson published a book entitled Postmodernism and Cultural Theories (Chinese: 后现代主义与文化理论; pinyin: Hòuxiàndàizhǔyì yǔ wénhuà lǐlùn), translated into Chinese by Tang Xiaobing. Although the Chinese intelligentsia's engagement with postmodernism would not begin in earnest until the nineties, Postmodernism and Cultural Theories was to become a keystone text in that engagement; as scholar Wang Ning writes, its influence on Chinese thinkers would be impossible to overestimate.[27] Its popularity may be partially due to the facts that it was not written in a dense style and that, because of Jameson's writing style, it was possible to use the text to support either praise or criticism of the Chinese manifestation of postmodernity.[27] In Wang Chaohua's interpretation of events, Jameson's work was mostly used to support praise, in what amounted to a fundamental misreading of Jameson:

The caustic edge of Jameson's theory, which had described postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism," was abandoned for a contented or even enthusiastic endorsement of mass culture, which [a certain group of Chinese critics] saw as a new space of popular freedom. According to these critics, intellectuals, who conceived of themselves as the bearers of modernity, were reacting with shock and anxiety at their loss of control with the arrival of postmodern consumer society, uttering cries of "quixotic hysteria," panic-stricken by the realization of what they had once called for during the eighties.[26]

The debate fueled by Jameson, and specifically Postmodernism and Cultural Theories, over postmodernism was at its most intense from 1994 to 1997, carried on by Chinese intellectuals both inside and outside the mainland; particularly important contributions came from Zhao Yiheng in London, Xu Ben in the United States, and Zhang Xudong, also in the United States, who had gone on to study under Jameson as a doctoral student at Duke.[26]

Publications edit

  • Sartre: The Origins of a Style. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1961.
  • Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1971.
  • The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1972. for more info see:[1]
  • Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1979. Reissued: 2008 (Verso)
  • The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 1981.
  • Postmodernism and Cultural Theories (Chinese: 后现代主义与文化理论; pinyin: Hòuxiàndàizhǔyì yǔ wénhuà lǐlùn). Tr. Tang Xiaobing. Xi'an: Shaanxi Normal University Press. 1987.
  • The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971–1986. Vol. 1: Situations of Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1988.
  • The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971–1986. Vol. 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1988.
  • Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Derry: Field Day, 1988. A collection of three Field Day Pamphlets by Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton and Edward Said.
  • Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. London & New York: Verso. 1990.
  • Signatures of the Visible. New York & London: Routledge. 1990.
  • Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1991.
  • The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1992.
  • The Seeds of Time. The Wellek Library lectures at the University of California, Irvine. New York: Columbia University Press. 1994.
  • Brecht and Method. London & New York: Verso. 1998. Reissued: 2011 (Verso)
  • The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. London & New York: Verso. 1998. Reissued: 2009 (Verso)
  • The Jameson Reader. Ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell. 2000.
  • A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London & New York Verso. 2002.
  • Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London & New York: Verso. 2005.
  • The Modernist Papers. London & New York Verso. 2007.
  • Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism. Ed. Ian Buchanan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2007.
  • The Ideologies of Theory. London & New York: Verso. 2009. (One-volume edition, with additional essays)
  • Valences of the Dialectic. London & New York: Verso. 2009.
  • The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit. London & New York: Verso. 2010.
  • Representing 'Capital': A Reading of Volume One. London & New York: Verso. 2011.
  • The Antinomies of Realism. London & New York: Verso. 2013.
  • The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms. London & New York: Verso. 2015.
  • An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army. Ed. Slavoj Žižek. London and New York: Verso. 2016.
  • Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality. London and New York: Verso. 2016.
  • Allegory and Ideology. London and New York: Verso. 2019.
  • The Benjamin Files. London and New York: Verso. 2020.

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ Mohanty, Satya P. "Jameson's Marxist Hermeneutics and the need for an Adequate Epistemology." In Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, pp. 93–115.
  2. ^ David Kaufmann, "Thanks for the Memory: Bloch, Benjamin and the Philosophy of History," in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, ed. Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan (London and New York: Verson, 1997), p. 33.
  3. ^ Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1991. p. 438. ISBN 81-903403-2-8. OCLC 948832273.
  4. ^ "Fredric Jameson". Duke University – Scholars@Duke. Retrieved 2 June 2023.
  5. ^ "Fredric Jameson to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award". Today.duke.edu. 4 December 2011. Retrieved 2 October 2017.
  6. ^ Roberts, Adam (2000). Fredric Jameson (Routledge Critical Thinkers). London: Routledge. p. 2.
  7. ^ Bellano, Anthony. "Moorestown Friends School Alum Wins Capote Award for Book on Realism; Frederic Jameson won $30,000 for his book The Antinomies of Realism.", Moorestown Patch, November 11, 2014. Accessed May 18, 2020.
  8. ^ Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, "Introduction" to Fredric Jameson, The Jameson Reader, ed. Hardt and Weeks, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, p. 5.
  9. ^ a b Buchanan, Ian (2006). Fredric Jameson: Live Theory. London and New York: Continuum.
  10. ^ Fredric Jameson, "Interview with Srinivas Aramudan and Ranjanna Khanna," in Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism, ed. Ian Buchanan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 204.
  11. ^ . Archived from the original on 2012-03-08. Retrieved 2012-02-09.
  12. ^ Jameson, Fredric (1974). Marxism and Form. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01311-4. Retrieved 23 October 2020.
  13. ^ Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982., p. 76
  14. ^ Kristeva, Julia. "Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art". Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. pp. 2, 36.
  15. ^ Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981, p. 10
  16. ^ Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 382.
  17. ^ Jameson, Fredric (November 21, 2023). "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (PDF). p. 69. (PDF) from the original on April 3, 2023.
  18. ^ Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991, p. 47.
  19. ^ Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, London and New York: Verso, 2013, p. 11.
  20. ^ Sara Danius, "About Fredric R. Jameson" 2011-10-02 at the Wayback Machine. Cf. Postmodernism xxii; The Modernist Papers x; A Singular Modernity, copyright page; Archaeologies of the Future 15n8.
  21. ^ Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations, London and New York: Verso, 2010, p. 126, n. 41. Cf. Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, London and New York: Verso, 2013, p. 37, n. 13.
  22. ^ "Fredric Jameson receives Truman Capote Award", Iowa Now, May 23, 2014.
  23. ^ "Professor Fredric R. Jameson awarded Holberg Prize 2008". Norway.org. 16 September 2008. Retrieved 2011-08-04.
  24. ^ "American cultural theorist awarded the Holberg Prize". Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Norway). Retrieved 2011-08-04.
  25. ^ Zhang, Xudong (Summer 1994). "On some motifs in the Chinese "Cultural Fever" of the late 1980s: social change, ideology, and theory". Social Text. Duke University Press. 39 (39): 129–156. doi:10.2307/466367. JSTOR 466367.
  26. ^ a b c Hui, Wang (2003), "Introduction: minds of the nineties", in Wang, Chaohua (ed.), One China, many paths, London New York: Verso, pp. 9–37, ISBN 978-1-84467-535-7. Preview.
  27. ^ a b c Wang Ning. "The Mapping of Chinese Postmodernity." Postmodernism and China. Ed. Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
  28. ^ Hui, Wang (2003), "The new criticism", in Wang, Chaohua (ed.), One China, many paths, London New York: Verso, pp. 55–87, ISBN 978-1-84467-535-7. Preview.
    • Previously published, in an earlier version, as Hui, Wang (November–December 2000). "Fire at the castle gate". New Left Review. New Left Review. II (6): 69–99.

Further reading edit

  • Ahmad, Aijaz. "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory'". In In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London and New York: Verso. 1992. 95–122.
  • Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London and New York: Verso. 1998.
  • Arac, Jonathan. "Frederic Jameson and Marxism." In Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies. New York: Columbia University Press. 1987. 261–279.
  • Balakrishnan, Gopal (November–December 2010). "The coming contradiction". New Left Review. New Left Review. II (66).
  • Buchanan, Ian. Fredric Jameson: Live Theory. London and New York: Continuum. 2006.
  • Burnham, Clint. The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1995.
  • Carp, Alex. "On Fredric Jameson." Jacobin (magazine) (March 5, 2014).
  • Davis, Mike (May–June 1985). "Urban renaissance and the spirit of postmodernism". New Left Review. New Left Review. I (151): 106–113.
  • Day, Gail. Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. 2011.
  • Dowling, William C. Jameson, Althusser, Marx: an Introduction to the Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1984.
  • Eagleton, Terry. "Fredric Jameson: the Politics of Style." In Against the Grain: Selected Essays 1975–1985. London: Verso, 1986. 65–78.
  • Eagleton, Terry (September–October 2009). "Jameson and Form". New Left Review. New Left Review. II (59): 123–137.
  • Gatto, Marco. Fredric Jameson: neomarxismo, dialettica e teoria della letteratura. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino. 2008.
  • Helmling, Stephen. The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2001.
  • Homer, Sean. Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. 1998.
  • Hullot-Kentor, Robert. "Suggested Reading: Jameson on Adorno". In Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 220–233.
  • Irr, Caren and Ian Buchanan, eds. On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2005.
  • Kellner, Douglas, ed. Jameson/Postmodernism/Critique. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press. 1989.
  • Kellner, Douglas, and Sean Homer, eds. Fredric Jameson: a Critical Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004.
  • Kunkel, Benjamin. "Into the Big Tent". London Review of Books 32.8 (April 22, 2010). 12–16.
  • LaCapra, Dominick. "Marxism in the Textual Maelstrom: Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious." In Rethinking Intellectual History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1983. 234–267.
  • Link, Alex. "The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson's Gothic Plots." Theorising the Gothic. Eds. Jerrold E. Hogle and Andrew Smith. Special issue of Gothic Studies 11.1 (2009): 70–85.
  • Millay, Thomas J. "Always Historicize! On Fredric Jameson, the Tea Party, and Theological Pragmatics." The Other Journal 22 (2013).
  • Osborne, Peter. "A Marxism for the Postmodern? Jameson's Adorno". New German Critique 56 (1992): 171–192.
  • Roberts, Adam. Fredric Jameson. New York: Routledge, 2000.
  • Iona Singh (2004) Vermeer, materialism, and the transcendental in art, Rethinking Marxism, 16:2, 155–171, DOI: 10.1080/08935690410001676212
  • Tally, Robert T. Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism. London: Pluto, 2014.
  • Tally, Robert T. "Jameson's Project of Cognitive Mapping." In Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change. Ed. Rolland G. Paulston. New York: Garland, 1996. 399–416.
  • Weber, Samuel. "Capitalising History: Notes on The Political Unconscious." In The Politics of Theory. Ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, and Diana Loxley. Colchester: University of Essex Press. 1983. 248–264.
  • West, Cornel. "Fredric Jameson's Marxist Hermeneutics." Boundary 2 11.1–2 (1982–83). 177–200.
  • White, Hayden. "Getting Out of History: Jameson's Redemption of Narrative." In The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1987. 142–168.

fredric, jameson, born, april, 1934, american, literary, critic, philosopher, marxist, political, theorist, best, known, analysis, contemporary, cultural, trends, particularly, analysis, postmodernity, capitalism, jameson, best, known, books, include, postmode. Fredric Jameson born April 14 1934 is an American literary critic philosopher and Marxist political theorist He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism Jameson s best known books include Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 1991 3 and The Political Unconscious 1981 Fredric JamesonBorn 1934 04 14 April 14 1934 age 89 Cleveland Ohio U S Alma materHaverford CollegeYale UniversityEra20th 21st century philosophyRegionWestern philosophySchoolWestern MarxismMarxist hermeneutics 1 Main interestsMarxist literary criticism Marxist cultural analysis Postmodernism modernism science fiction utopia history narrative cultural studies dialectics structuralismNotable ideasCognitive mapping national allegory political unconsciousJameson is the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature Professor of Romance Studies French and Director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University 4 In 2012 the Modern Language Association gave Jameson its sixth Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement 5 Contents 1 Life and works 1 1 Early works 1 2 Research into Marxism 1 3 Narrative and history 1 4 Critique of postmodernism 1 5 Recent work 1 6 Holberg International Memorial Prize 1 7 Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award 1 8 Influence in China 2 Publications 3 See also 4 References 5 Further readingLife and works editJameson was born in Cleveland Ohio 6 and graduated in 1950 from Moorestown Friends School 7 After graduating in 1954 from Haverford College where his professors included Wayne Booth 8 he briefly traveled to Europe studying at Aix en Provence Munich and Berlin where he learned of new developments in continental philosophy including the rise of structuralism He returned to America the following year to pursue a doctoral degree at Yale University where he studied under Erich Auerbach Early works edit Auerbach would prove to be a lasting influence on Jameson s thought This was already apparent in Jameson s doctoral dissertation published in 1961 as Sartre the Origins of a Style Auerbach s concerns were rooted in the German philological tradition his works on the history of style analyzed literary form within social history Jameson would follow in these steps examining the articulation of poetry history philology and philosophy in the works of Jean Paul Sartre Jameson s work focused on the relation between the style of Sartre s writings and the political and ethical positions of his existentialist philosophy The occasional Marxian aspects of Sartre s work were glossed over in this book Jameson would return to them in the following decade 9 29 30 Jameson s dissertation though it drew on a long tradition of European cultural analysis differed markedly from the prevailing trends of Anglo American academia which were empiricism and logical positivism in philosophy and linguistics and New Critical formalism in literary criticism It nevertheless earned Jameson a position at Harvard University where he taught during the first half of the 1960s Research into Marxism edit His interest in Sartre led Jameson to intense study of Marxist literary theory Even though Karl Marx was becoming an important influence in American social science partly through the influence of the many European intellectuals who had sought refuge from the Second World War in the United States such as Theodor Adorno the literary and critical work of the Western Marxists was still largely unknown in American academia in the late 1950s and early 1960s 9 120 Jameson s shift toward Marxism was also driven by his increasing political connection with the New Left and pacifist movements as well as by the Cuban Revolution which Jameson took as a sign that Marxism was alive and well as a collective movement and a culturally productive force 10 His research focused on critical theory thinkers of and influenced by the Frankfurt School such as Kenneth Burke Gyorgy Lukacs Ernst Bloch Theodor Adorno Walter Benjamin Herbert Marcuse Louis Althusser and Sartre who viewed cultural criticism as an integral feature of Marxist theory In 1969 Jameson co founded the Marxist Literary Group with a number of his graduate students at the University of California San Diego 11 While the Orthodox Marxist view of ideology held that the cultural superstructure was completely determined by the economic base the Western Marxists critically analyzed culture as a historical and social phenomenon alongside economic production and distribution or political power relationships They held that culture must be studied using the Hegelian concept of immanent critique the theory that adequate description and criticism of a philosophical or cultural text must be carried out in the same terms that text itself employs in order to develop its internal inconsistencies in a manner that allows intellectual advancement Marx highlighted immanent critique in his early writings derived from Hegel s development of a new form of dialectical thinking that would attempt as Jameson comments to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps 12 Narrative and history edit History came to play an increasingly central role in Jameson s interpretation of both the reading consumption and writing production of literary texts Jameson marked his full fledged commitment to Hegelian Marxist philosophy with the publication of The Political Unconscious Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act the opening slogan of which is always historicize 1981 The Political Unconscious takes as its object not the literary text itself but rather the interpretive frameworks by which it is now constructed It emerges as a manifesto for new activity concerning literary narrative The book s argument emphasized history as the ultimate horizon of literary and cultural analysis It borrowed notions from the structuralist tradition and from Raymond Williams s work in cultural studies and joined them to a largely Marxist view of labor whether blue collar or intellectual as the focal point of analysis Jameson s readings exploited both the explicit formal and thematic choices of the writer and the unconscious framework guiding these Artistic choices that were ordinarily viewed in purely aesthetic terms were recast in terms of historical literary practices and norms in an attempt to develop a systematic inventory of the constraints they imposed on the artist as an individual creative subject To further this meta commentary Jameson described the ideologeme or the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes the smallest legible residue of the real life ongoing struggles occurring between social classes 13 The term ideologeme was first used by Mikhail Bakhtin and Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev in their work The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship and was later popularised by Julia Kristeva Kristeva defined it as the intersection of a given textual arrangement with the utterances that it either assimilates into its own space or to which it refers in the space of exterior texts 14 Jameson s establishment of history as the only pertinent factor in this analysis which derived the categories governing artistic production from their historical framework was paired with a bold theoretical claim His book claimed to establish Marxian literary criticism centered in the notion of an artistic mode of production as the most all inclusive and comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding literature 15 According to Vincent B Leitch the publication of The Political Unconscious rendered Jameson the leading Marxist literary critic in America 16 Critique of postmodernism edit In 1984 during his tenure as Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz Jameson published an article titled Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in the journal New Left Review This controversial article which Jameson later expanded into a book was part of a series of analyses of postmodernism from the dialectical perspective Jameson had developed in his earlier work on narrative Jameson viewed the postmodern skepticism towards metanarratives as a mode of experience stemming from the conditions of intellectual labor imposed by the late capitalist mode of production further explanation needed Postmodernists claimed that the complex differentiation between spheres or fields of life such as the political the social the cultural the commercial and between distinct social classes and roles within each field had been overcome by the crisis of foundationalism and the consequent relativization of truth claims Jameson argued against this asserting that these phenomena had or could have been understood successfully within a modernist framework the postmodern failure to achieve this understanding implied an abrupt break in the dialectical refinement of thought citation needed In his view postmodernity s merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated whole was the result of the colonization of the cultural sphere which had retained at least partial autonomy during the prior modernist era by a newly organized corporate capitalism Following Adorno and Horkheimer s analysis of the culture industry Jameson discussed this phenomenon in his critical discussion of architecture film narrative and visual arts as well as in his strictly philosophical work Two of Jameson s best known claims from Postmodernism are that postmodernity is characterized by pastiche and a crisis in historicity Jameson argued that parody which implies a moral judgment or a comparison with societal norms was replaced by pastiche collage and other forms of juxtaposition without a normative grounding Relatedly Jameson argued that the postmodern era suffers from a crisis in historicity there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the American history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current multinational high rise stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life 17 Jameson s analysis of postmodernism attempted to view it as historically grounded he therefore explicitly rejected any moralistic opposition to postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon and continued to insist upon a Hegelian immanent critique that would think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically as catastrophe and progress all together 18 His refusal to simply dismiss postmodernism from the onset however was misinterpreted by some Marxist intellectuals as an implicit endorsement of postmodern views Recent work edit Jameson s later writings include Archaeologies of the Future a study of utopia and science fiction launched at Monash University in Melbourne Australia in December 2005 and The Modernist Papers 2007 a collection of essays on modernism that is meant to accompany the theoretical A Singular Modernity 2002 as a source book These books along with Postmodernism and The Antinomies of Realism 2013 19 form part of an ongoing study entitled The Poetics of Social Forms which attempts in Sara Danius s words to provide a general history of aesthetic forms at the same time seeking to show how this history can be read in tandem with a history of social and economic formations 20 As of 2010 Jameson intends to supplement the already published volumes of The Poetics of Social Forms with a study of allegory entitled Overtones The Harmonics of Allegory 21 The Antinomies of Realism won the 2014 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism 22 Alongside this continuing project he has recently published three related studies of dialectical theory Valences of the Dialectic 2009 which includes Jameson s critical responses to Slavoj Zizek Gilles Deleuze and other contemporary theorists The Hegel Variations 2010 a commentary on Hegel s Phenomenology of Spirit and Representing Capital A Reading of Volume One 2011 an analysis of Marx s Das Kapital An overview of Jameson s work Fredric Jameson Live Theory by Ian Buchanan was published in 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize edit In 2008 Jameson was awarded the annual Holberg International Memorial Prize in recognition of his career long research on the relation between social formations and cultural forms 23 The prize which was worth 4 6 million kr approximately 648 000 was presented to Jameson by Tora Aasland Norwegian Minister of Education and Research in Bergen Norway on 26 November 2008 24 Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award edit In 2009 Jameson was awarded the Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award by the North American Society for Utopian Studies Influence in China edit Jameson has had an influence on the theorization of the postmodern in China In mid 1985 shortly after the beginning of the cultural fever early 1985 to June Fourth 1989 a period in Chinese intellectual history characterized in part by intense interest in Western critical theory literary theory and related disciplines 25 Jameson discussed the idea of postmodernism in China in lectures at Peking University and the newly founded Shenzhen University 26 27 Jameson s ideas as presented at Peking University had an impact on some students including Zhang Yiwu and Zhang Xudong scholars whose work would come to play an important role in the analysis of postmodernity in China 28 In 1987 Jameson published a book entitled Postmodernism and Cultural Theories Chinese 后现代主义与文化理论 pinyin Houxiandaizhǔyi yǔ wenhua lǐlun translated into Chinese by Tang Xiaobing Although the Chinese intelligentsia s engagement with postmodernism would not begin in earnest until the nineties Postmodernism and Cultural Theories was to become a keystone text in that engagement as scholar Wang Ning writes its influence on Chinese thinkers would be impossible to overestimate 27 Its popularity may be partially due to the facts that it was not written in a dense style and that because of Jameson s writing style it was possible to use the text to support either praise or criticism of the Chinese manifestation of postmodernity 27 In Wang Chaohua s interpretation of events Jameson s work was mostly used to support praise in what amounted to a fundamental misreading of Jameson The caustic edge of Jameson s theory which had described postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism was abandoned for a contented or even enthusiastic endorsement of mass culture which a certain group of Chinese critics saw as a new space of popular freedom According to these critics intellectuals who conceived of themselves as the bearers of modernity were reacting with shock and anxiety at their loss of control with the arrival of postmodern consumer society uttering cries of quixotic hysteria panic stricken by the realization of what they had once called for during the eighties 26 The debate fueled by Jameson and specifically Postmodernism and Cultural Theories over postmodernism was at its most intense from 1994 to 1997 carried on by Chinese intellectuals both inside and outside the mainland particularly important contributions came from Zhao Yiheng in London Xu Ben in the United States and Zhang Xudong also in the United States who had gone on to study under Jameson as a doctoral student at Duke 26 Publications editSartre The Origins of a Style New Haven Yale University Press 1961 Marxism and Form Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature Princeton Princeton University Press 1971 The Prison House of Language A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism Princeton Princeton University Press 1972 for more info see 1 Fables of Aggression Wyndham Lewis the Modernist as Fascist Berkeley University of California Press 1979 Reissued 2008 Verso The Political Unconscious Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act Ithaca N Y Cornell University Press 1981 Postmodernism and Cultural Theories Chinese 后现代主义与文化理论 pinyin Houxiandaizhǔyi yǔ wenhua lǐlun Tr Tang Xiaobing Xi an Shaanxi Normal University Press 1987 The Ideologies of Theory Essays 1971 1986 Vol 1 Situations of Theory Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1988 The Ideologies of Theory Essays 1971 1986 Vol 2 The Syntax of History Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1988 Nationalism Colonialism and Literature Derry Field Day 1988 A collection of three Field Day Pamphlets by Fredric Jameson Terry Eagleton and Edward Said Late Marxism Adorno or The Persistence of the Dialectic London amp New York Verso 1990 Signatures of the Visible New York amp London Routledge 1990 Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Durham NC Duke University Press 1991 The Geopolitical Aesthetic Cinema and Space in the World System Bloomington Indiana University Press 1992 The Seeds of Time The Wellek Library lectures at the University of California Irvine New York Columbia University Press 1994 Brecht and Method London amp New York Verso 1998 Reissued 2011 Verso The Cultural Turn Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983 1998 London amp New York Verso 1998 Reissued 2009 Verso The Jameson Reader Ed Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks Oxford Blackwell 2000 A Singular Modernity Essay on the Ontology of the Present London amp New York Verso 2002 Archaeologies of the Future The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions London amp New York Verso 2005 The Modernist Papers London amp New York Verso 2007 Jameson on Jameson Conversations on Cultural Marxism Ed Ian Buchanan Durham NC Duke University Press 2007 The Ideologies of Theory London amp New York Verso 2009 One volume edition with additional essays Valences of the Dialectic London amp New York Verso 2009 The Hegel Variations On the Phenomenology of Spirit London amp New York Verso 2010 Representing Capital A Reading of Volume One London amp New York Verso 2011 The Antinomies of Realism London amp New York Verso 2013 The Ancients and the Postmoderns On the Historicity of Forms London amp New York Verso 2015 An American Utopia Dual Power and the Universal Army Ed Slavoj Zizek London and New York Verso 2016 Raymond Chandler The Detections of Totality London and New York Verso 2016 Allegory and Ideology London and New York Verso 2019 The Benjamin Files London and New York Verso 2020 See also edit nbsp Wikiquote has quotations related to Fredric Jameson Dialectic Dialectical materialism Hegel Late capitalism Literary realism Literary theory Marx Marxism Marxist theorists Modernism Political consciousness Postmodernism Psychoanalytic sociology UtopiaReferences edit Mohanty Satya P Jameson s Marxist Hermeneutics and the need for an Adequate Epistemology In Literary Theory and the Claims of History Postmodernism Objectivity Multicultural Politics Ithaca Cornell University Press 1997 pp 93 115 David Kaufmann Thanks for the Memory Bloch Benjamin and the Philosophy of History in Not Yet Reconsidering Ernst Bloch ed Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan London and New York Verson 1997 p 33 Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Durham NC Duke University Press 1991 p 438 ISBN 81 903403 2 8 OCLC 948832273 Fredric Jameson Duke University Scholars Duke Retrieved 2 June 2023 Fredric Jameson to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award Today duke edu 4 December 2011 Retrieved 2 October 2017 Roberts Adam 2000 Fredric Jameson Routledge Critical Thinkers London Routledge p 2 Bellano Anthony Moorestown Friends School Alum Wins Capote Award for Book on Realism Frederic Jameson won 30 000 for his book The Antinomies of Realism Moorestown Patch November 11 2014 Accessed May 18 2020 Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks Introduction to Fredric Jameson The Jameson Reader ed Hardt and Weeks Oxford Blackwell 2000 p 5 a b Buchanan Ian 2006 Fredric Jameson Live Theory London and New York Continuum Fredric Jameson Interview with Srinivas Aramudan and Ranjanna Khanna in Jameson on Jameson Conversations on Cultural Marxism ed Ian Buchanan Durham NC Duke University Press 2007 p 204 A Short History of the MLG MLG Archived from the original on 2012 03 08 Retrieved 2012 02 09 Jameson Fredric 1974 Marxism and Form Princeton University Press ISBN 978 0 691 01311 4 Retrieved 23 October 2020 Jameson Fredric The Political Unconscious Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act Ithaca NY Cornell UP 1982 p 76 Kristeva Julia Desire in Language A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art Ed Leon S Roudiez Trans Thomas Gora Alice Jardine and Leon S Roudiez New York Columbia UP 1980 pp 2 36 Fredric Jameson The Political Unconscious Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act Ithaca NY Cornell University Press 1981 p 10 Vincent B Leitch American Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s New York Columbia University Press p 382 Jameson Fredric November 21 2023 Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism PDF p 69 Archived PDF from the original on April 3 2023 Fredric Jameson Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Durham NC Duke University Press 1991 p 47 Fredric Jameson The Antinomies of Realism London and New York Verso 2013 p 11 Sara Danius About Fredric R Jameson Archived 2011 10 02 at the Wayback Machine Cf Postmodernism xxii The Modernist Papers x A Singular Modernity copyright page Archaeologies of the Future 15n8 Fredric Jameson The Hegel Variations London and New York Verso 2010 p 126 n 41 Cf Fredric Jameson The Antinomies of Realism London and New York Verso 2013 p 37 n 13 Fredric Jameson receives Truman Capote Award Iowa Now May 23 2014 Professor Fredric R Jameson awarded Holberg Prize 2008 Norway org 16 September 2008 Retrieved 2011 08 04 American cultural theorist awarded the Holberg Prize Ministry of Foreign Affairs Norway Retrieved 2011 08 04 Zhang Xudong Summer 1994 On some motifs in the Chinese Cultural Fever of the late 1980s social change ideology and theory Social Text Duke University Press 39 39 129 156 doi 10 2307 466367 JSTOR 466367 a b c Hui Wang 2003 Introduction minds of the nineties in Wang Chaohua ed One China many paths London New York Verso pp 9 37 ISBN 978 1 84467 535 7 Preview a b c Wang Ning The Mapping of Chinese Postmodernity Postmodernism and China Ed Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang Durham Duke University Press 2001 Hui Wang 2003 The new criticism in Wang Chaohua ed One China many paths London New York Verso pp 55 87 ISBN 978 1 84467 535 7 Preview Previously published in an earlier version as Hui Wang November December 2000 Fire at the castle gate New Left Review New Left Review II 6 69 99 Further reading editAhmad Aijaz Jameson s Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory In In Theory Classes Nations Literatures London and New York Verso 1992 95 122 Anderson Perry The Origins of Postmodernity London and New York Verso 1998 Arac Jonathan Frederic Jameson and Marxism In Critical Genealogies Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies New York Columbia University Press 1987 261 279 Balakrishnan Gopal November December 2010 The coming contradiction New Left Review New Left Review II 66 Buchanan Ian Fredric Jameson Live Theory London and New York Continuum 2006 Burnham Clint The Jamesonian Unconscious The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory Durham NC Duke University Press 1995 Carp Alex On Fredric Jameson Jacobin magazine March 5 2014 Davis Mike May June 1985 Urban renaissance and the spirit of postmodernism New Left Review New Left Review I 151 106 113 Day Gail Dialectical Passions Negation in Postwar Art Theory New York Columbia University Press 2011 Dowling William C Jameson Althusser Marx an Introduction to the Political Unconscious Ithaca Cornell University Press 1984 Eagleton Terry Fredric Jameson the Politics of Style In Against the Grain Selected Essays 1975 1985 London Verso 1986 65 78 Eagleton Terry September October 2009 Jameson and Form New Left Review New Left Review II 59 123 137 Gatto Marco Fredric Jameson neomarxismo dialettica e teoria della letteratura Soveria Mannelli Rubbettino 2008 Helmling Stephen The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson Writing the Sublime and the Dialectic of Critique Albany State University of New York Press 2001 Homer Sean Fredric Jameson Marxism Hermeneutics Postmodernism New York Routledge 1998 Hullot Kentor Robert Suggested Reading Jameson on Adorno In Things Beyond Resemblance Collected Essays on Theodor W Adorno New York Columbia University Press 2008 220 233 Irr Caren and Ian Buchanan eds On Jameson From Postmodernism to Globalization Albany State University of New York Press 2005 Kellner Douglas ed Jameson Postmodernism Critique Washington DC Maisonneuve Press 1989 Kellner Douglas and Sean Homer eds Fredric Jameson a Critical Reader New York Palgrave Macmillan 2004 Kunkel Benjamin Into the Big Tent London Review of Books 32 8 April 22 2010 12 16 LaCapra Dominick Marxism in the Textual Maelstrom Fredric Jameson s The Political Unconscious In Rethinking Intellectual History Ithaca Cornell University Press 1983 234 267 Link Alex The Mysteries of Postmodernism or Fredric Jameson s Gothic Plots Theorising the Gothic Eds Jerrold E Hogle and Andrew Smith Special issue of Gothic Studies 11 1 2009 70 85 Millay Thomas J Always Historicize On Fredric Jameson the Tea Party and Theological Pragmatics The Other Journal22 2013 Osborne Peter A Marxism for the Postmodern Jameson s Adorno New German Critique 56 1992 171 192 Roberts Adam Fredric Jameson New York Routledge 2000 Iona Singh 2004 Vermeer materialism and the transcendental in art Rethinking Marxism 16 2 155 171 DOI 10 1080 08935690410001676212 Tally Robert T Fredric Jameson The Project of Dialectical Criticism London Pluto 2014 Tally Robert T Jameson s Project of Cognitive Mapping In Social Cartography Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change Ed Rolland G Paulston New York Garland 1996 399 416 Weber Samuel Capitalising History Notes on The Political Unconscious In The Politics of Theory Ed Francis Barker Peter Hulme Margaret Iversen and Diana Loxley Colchester University of Essex Press 1983 248 264 West Cornel Fredric Jameson s Marxist Hermeneutics Boundary 2 11 1 2 1982 83 177 200 White Hayden Getting Out of History Jameson s Redemption of Narrative In The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 1987 142 168 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Fredric Jameson amp oldid 1198678222, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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