SOURCE: “Late Jameson,” in Salmagundi, No. 111, Summer, 1996, pp. 213-32.

In the following review, Harpham provides an overview of Jameson's writings and intellectual development and offers an unfavorable assessment of The Seeds of Time, which he views as a “softening” and capitulation of Jameson's Marxism for an ineffectual postmodern perspective.

Forever, it seems, Fredric Jameson has been described as “America’s leading Marxist critic.” Since the appearance of the challenging and sternly magisterial Marxism and Form in 1971, nobody else has had a shred of a claim to this title, certainly not now, when to be the foremost Marxist might seem a bit like being the leading manufacturer of typewriters, turntables, or four-wheel roller skates. The stature of Jameson, a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, has survived the dissolution of that perennial embarrassment and drag on theory, “actually existing” socialism; it has survived, too, the general (if...