The members of the Marxist Literary Group mourn the loss of the group's founder and intellectual lodestar, Fredric R. Jameson.
It would be all but impossible to name anyone who has been more central to and representative of the MLG, its mission and its esprit de corps over its fifty plus years of continuous life as an organization devoted to the study and furtherance of Marxism in its relation to literature, culture and pretty much everything else.
Fred Jameson was one of a group of then young academics who founded the MLG as a caucus of the Modern Languages Association in the late 1960s in the context of a movement to protest the US imperialist war in Vietnam. He was, for many years, a regular participant in its meetings, including the summer gatherings that eventually evolved into the Institute on Culture and Society. But even when his worldwide renown and the demands on his time and presence made his participation in MLG activities less frequent, he remained a steadfast friend of the organization, making a memorable appearance at ICS as late as 2013 at Ohio State University in Columbus.
Numbers of us had the great fortune to be his doctoral students, but many, many more of us were educated by Fred Jameson – and profoundly so – in ways that are simply without parallel, whether in his classrooms, attending his lectures or, above all, by reading his books. From Marxism and Form and The Prison House of Language to The Political Unconscious to Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism to Valences of the Dialectic – to name only a few of the most prominent – he both defined what it meant and what it could mean to be a Marxist literary and critical theorist, and he taught us how to be one as did no one else and as, in all likelihood, no one else will ever again be able to replicate.
And he was a comrade – unfailingly generous, the antithesis of the snobbery and elitism that so often afflict intellectual stardom. The tenure letters and letters of recommendation written by Fred Jameson for countless numbers of us could probably fill a stadium.
Fred Jameson was for years universally acknowledged to be the most influential literary scholar and theorist of his time writing in English, even by those probably uncomfortable with his Marxism. At age 90, he was still publishing and was very possibly as influential and intellectually inspiring and formative as ever. His enormous popularity and broad appeal proved to the world of letters that Marxism as theory simply has no equal in explanatory power.
We will miss him terribly.
