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Fredric Jameson

Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature
Literature
Box 90670, Durham, NC 27708
101 Friedl Bldg, 1316 Campus Drive Box 90670, Durham, NC 27708
Office hours Thursdays 11:45am-1:45pm via Skype.  

Overview


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.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature · 2013 - Present Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Professor of Literature · 1985 - Present Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Professor of Romance Studies · 1985 - Present Romance Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

Education, Training & Certifications


Yale University · 1959 Ph.D.
Yale University · 1956 M.A.
Haverford College · 1954 B.A.