Comrades

The Frankfurt School

Though I didn't have the opportunity to meet all of them, guys like Kenneth Burke, György Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Louis Althusser were my Marxist intellectual comrades. By studying these guys, I learned about late capitalism (see "Buzzwords"), the tangled web of bureaucratic control, and the sinister, greedy bond between government and big business.

Important information: the Frankfurt School (and yours truly) distinguished itself from the Communist Party by seeing Marxism as something that could not be reduced to a concern with the working class. Our Marxism is about psychological control and artistic production—we're Marxism's thinking side.

Chinese Scholars

I'm huge in China—which is saying a lot, considering the size of that country. It's no exaggeration to say that I brought postmodernism to the masses—specifically to the Chinese people (not all 1.351 billion of them, but enough to make a difference).

My lectures on postmodernism at the Peking University were like artisanal cheese at a hipster convention—a big deal. Pretty much anyone who wanted to drill deeper on the whole late capitalism/postmodernism/China trifecta picked up my newly translated book Postmodernism and Cultural Theories. A collection of Chinese scholars took to my ideas about industrial development, economic modernization, and consumer society.

Erich Auerbach

I was Auerbach's student at Yale, but not believing in hierarchies (usually), we became comrades as well. Dr. Auerbach—er, Erich—was a little angel on my shoulder as I wrote my dissertation on no less a thinker than French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.

Auerbach—that German master of mimesis—introduced me to tons of cool ideas he imported from Germany (he was exiled by Nazis). Anyway, Auerbach taught me that realism matters. His masterpiece on representation—Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature—gently guided me toward recognizing that more realism means greater understanding of social and human realities.

Terry Eagleton

This fellow Marxist called me "America's leading Marxist critic." I feel the love. Everyone knows that Terry is fierce competition for the role of Western culture's most important living Marxist critic, so it's pretty sweet that he'd give me that endorsement. If you want to read more praise by this Goliath of British literary theory, you can read his affectionate essay, "Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style."

Rivals

Roger Kimball

If you would like to access a ceaseless flow of critical venom and sarcasm about me (and my Marxist teammate across the pond, Terry Eagleton), subscribe to The New Criterion‎ today. Its very own publisher and editor-in-chief—Roger Kimball—always saves a little space for condemning me.

Kimball likes to accuse me of being purposely obtuse, and he charges me with being a bit of a rosy-tinted idealist about the 1960s. Oh—he also calls me out for being a hypocrite. Why? Because I take cushy endowed chair positions while railing against capitalism. (Awkward.)

Northrop Frye

You may just want to chalk this up to a minor scrap, but Frye and I just couldn't agree on the whole myth versus ideology debate. He thought that myth was way more important, arguing that mythical thinking was the first and most important mode of thought.

I say it's not about what came first; it's about what's more important in the era of late capitalism and postmodernism. Sure, myth is important, but we have a cold ugly reality to deal with, and while people are dreaming, praying, and mythologizing, they're totally not facing the brutal consequences of ideology and the realities of history.

Steven Hemling

Suffice it to say that this English professor from Delaware wrote a book called The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson. Now, that in itself does not make him an enemy or a rival. (There's no such thing as bad press, right? Right?) I have to admit his book is pretty fair, but he does mention (unnamed) critics who mock the murkiness of my prose and question the use of words like "rigor" in reference to my work. Man, I burn the candle and both ends, and I just can't get the love.