SOURCE: A review of The Seeds of Time, in Modern Philology, Vol. 94, No. 3, February, 1997, pp. 422-6.

In the following review of The Seeds of Time, Foley finds Jameson's commentary useful despite its failure to address historical causality, praxis, and the relationship between utopia and communism.

In The Seeds of Time, Fredric Jameson’s large imagination and insistent dissatisfaction with things as they are move us toward new insights into the nature of our postmodern malaise and new zones of cultural critique. In the first chapter, “The Antinomies of Postmodernity,” Jameson pursues the project of “cognitive mapping” proposed at the end of his Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1991). Arguing that “the age is clearly more propitious for the antinomy than the contradiction” (p. 2), Jameson outlines four symptomatic oppositions within which postmodern thought oscillates without resolution: between “absolute change” and “stasis” (p. 19); between a...