SOURCE: A review of The Seeds of Time, in Clio, Vol. 25, No. 2, Winter, 1996, pp. 212-6.

In the following review, Hutcheon judges The Seeds of Time to be at once “a startlingly insightful work and an irritating mix of generalization and assertion.”

The three chapters in this, Jameson’s latest engagement with the postmodern, were originally delivered as lectures in the Wellek Library Lecture series at the University of California, Irvine, in 1991, but his style of writing betrays none of this oral context. Jameson’s density of prose has always been the price to pay for his density of thought, and The Seeds of Time is no exception:

Getting rid of the old names, of all those abstractions that still reek of universalism or generality, cleaving with even greater determination to the empirical and the actual, stigmatizing the residual as philosophical in the bad sense, which is to say...