SOURCE: “The Professor of Necessity,” in The New Republic, February 19, 1990, pp. 34-9.

In the following review of The Ideologies of Theory, Bromwich finds contradictions in Jameson's “master narrative” concept and criticizes his unsubstantiated critical readings and “curiously messianic” exaltation of postmodernism.

“I must create a system,” said Blake, “or be enslaved by another man’s.” The vanguard slogans of the human sciences today have a rather different sound. To be ensnared by any number of systems, in succession or all at once: that is the favored stance.

Fredric Jameson, who has published studies of Sartre and Wyndham Lewis, came to be widely known in the early 1970s, with two books of a different kind. Marxism and Form surveyed a tradition of critical and utopian speculation generally associated with Adorno and the theorists of the Frankfurt School. The Prison-House of Language canvassed the structuralist theories of the sign, with...