Fredric Jameson
Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature

Fredric Jameson is currently Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of Romance Studies (French), and Director of the Institute for Critical Theory. He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1959 and taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of California before coming to Duke in 1985.

He is the author many books, including Marxism and Form (1971), The Political Unconscious (1981), and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1990, recipient of the MLA Lowell Award).  His more recent works include The Antinomies of Realism (2013, recipient of the Truman Capote Award), The Ancients and the Postmoderns (2015), Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality (2016), The Benjamin Files (2020), and Allegory and Ideology (2019). 

Among Professor Jameson's ongoing research concerns is the need to analyze literature as an encoding of political and social imperatives, and the interpretation of modernist and postmodernist assumptions through a rethinking of Marxist methodology.

Jameson's most frequently taught courses cover Marxism and psychoanalysis, existentialism, the Frankfurt School, modern french theory, modernist literature and film, and the 19th century novel.

He received the 2008 Holberg Prize and the 2011 MLA Lifetime Achievement Award for his scholarship.

Office Hours

Thursdays 11:45am-1:45pm via Skype.

Current Appointments & Affiliations

Contact Information

Some information on this profile has been compiled automatically from Duke databases and external sources. (Our About page explains how this works.) If you see a problem with the information, please write to Scholars@Duke and let us know. We will reply promptly.