SOURCE: A review of The Political Unconscious, in Modern Language Review, Vol. 80, No. 1, January, 1985, pp. 106-08.

In the following unfavorable review of The Political Unconscious, Parrinder calls Jameson's writing pedantic and his literary analysis unconvincing.

If I were to name a single work of commanding distinction in the field of literary theory published in America in the 1970s it would be Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form (1971). Its author combined a majestic overview of the twentieth-century Marxist tradition, focusing on the Frankfurt school, Lukács, and Sartre, with a concluding hundred-page essay in theoretical polemic entitled ‘Towards Dialectical Criticism’. Professor Jameson’s Hegelian advocacy of dialectical thinking and ‘metacommentary’ was of a piece with the lofty elegance of his manner, and with an adroitness and subtlety of argument which once and for all refuted the prejudice that Marxist criticism must necessarily be crude and reductive.

Jameson’s own...