SOURCE: “The Turn of the Screw,” in The Nation, October 15, 1990, pp. 425-7.

In the following positive review of Late Marxism, Ferber praises Jameson's analysis of Theodor Adorno and dialectical thought, but finds Jameson's prose often hampered by excessive qualification.

Fredric Jameson’s Late Marxism is the most philosophically sophisticated and searching study of Theodor Adorno to appear in English. Until recently, Adorno was best known in America for his part in the collaborative study The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and for a few essays on the arts, of which two in particular are famous, or infamous: a dismissive essay on jazz that appeared in English in 1946 and a searching philosophical response to Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, published the same year as the play (1958) and available in English a few years later.

He was also known as the “musical adviser” to Thomas Mann while Mann was at work on his great...