Jameson and Literature by Jarrad Cogle

Author:Jarrad Cogle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030548247
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

While criticisms of totalisation or generalisation have persisted throughout his career, this more specific accusation of a cultural imperialism has become important to our current perception of Jameson. His essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism ” (1986), and Aijaz Ahmad’s famous rebuke “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’” (1987) is likely the most famous controversy of Jameson’s career. The debate has particular relevance to his discussions of modernism, as we will see below. Firstly, however, it will be necessary to summarise this debate and its consequences.

Jameson’s essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism ” is an attempt to see regional literatures in relation to varying histories of colonisation, as well as differing positions within contemporary global capitalism. For Jameson, third-world literature is able to perform more varied operations than analogous Western material. He argues that “one of the determinants of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western realist and modernist novel, is a radical split between the private and the public, between … the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud versus Marx” [14, p. 69]. In contrast, Jameson interprets the work of two major figures—Lu Xun from China and Ousmane Sembène from Senegal—in order to demonstrate that “third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic … necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory” [14, p. 69]. The national allegory hypothesis is also tied to Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, whereby “what is here called ‘national allegory’ is clearly a form of … mapping of the totality, so that the present essay … sketches a theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature” [14, p. 88n].

Nevertheless, Jameson reinforces his position as a critic operating firmly within a US context. As Neil Lazarus notes, Jameson originally wrote “Third-World Literature” as a “memorial lecture at the University of California, San Diego honouring Jameson’s academic colleague and friend, Robert C. Elliot” [15, p. 55]. In the essay’s lengthy preamble—which foregrounds the difficulty for Western readers to engage with non-canonical texts—Jameson seems to assume that his audience is entirely comprised of Western academics. He returns to this notion later in the piece, where he claims:Any articulation of radical difference … is susceptible to appropriation by that strategy of otherness which Edward Said, in the context of the Middle East, called “orientalism.” It does not matter much that the radical otherness of the culture in question is praised or valorized positively, as in the preceding pages: the essential operation is that of differentiation, and once that has been accomplished, the mechanism Said denounces has been set in place. On the other hand, I don’t see how a first-world intellectual can avoid this operation without falling back into some general liberal and humanistic universalism: it seems to me that one of our basic political tasks lies precisely

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