SOURCE: “Shut Up and Listen,” in The Nation, May 29, 1995, pp. 762-4.

In the following review of The Seeds of Time, Schwabsky commends Jameson's intellectual range and subject, but faults his writing as condescending and overly evasive.

Fredric Jameson is indeed, as both Terry Eagleton and Hal Foster call him on the back of his new book’s jacket, America’s foremost Marxist critic, and he may well be too, as the publisher’s flap copy has it, this country’s leading Marxist theorist. But of what is he a critic, and what is his theory? Those are hard questions to answer, and The Seeds of Time does not make it any easier. Although he is a professor of comparative literature, only the second of the book’s three chapters is on a literary subject—it is an extended reading of Andrei Platonov’s novel Chevengur (1927–28)—while the first...