SOURCE: A review of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in Modern Language Review, Vol. 89, No. 1, January, 1994, pp. 168-69.

In the following review, Regan offers positive assessment of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

Fredric Jameson’s critique of postmodernism is salutary reading for anyone who might blithely assume that Marxist criticism lies in ruins with the Berlin Wall. It is precisely because Jameson’s vigorous political intelligence resists any simple celebration or easy disavowal of postmodern culture that we are given a book of such enormous intellectual ambition and theoretical complexity. Like Raymond Williams, whose presence in [Postmodernism] is strongly marked, Jameson approaches culture not just as a set of styles but as ‘lived experience’. For both writers, questions of culture are deeply implicated in questions of economic production and organization. Without abandoning the classical Marxist concepts of base and superstructure, Jameson is...