American literary and cultural critic, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke for four decades; the most influential American Marxist literary theorist of the late 20th century and the person who taught a generation of academics and cultural critics to read form as politics. Jameson's signature move — worked out across a dozen books beginning with Marxism and Form (1971) and The Political Unconscious (1981) — was to read literary and cultural texts as registering, beneath their explicit content, the contradictions of the economic order that produced them. "Always historicize" was his methodological slogan and, in his hands, the most productive form of the Marxist-hermeneutic claim.
His most widely cited work is the 1984 essay (later book) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which tied the stylistic markers of postmodern culture — pastiche, depthlessness, the waning of affect, the collapse of historical sense — to a specific stage of capitalism (multinational, financialized, post-Fordist). The phrase cultural logic of late capitalism has since escaped academic containment and become a standard way for even non-Marxists to describe the feel of contemporary culture. His later Archaeologies of the Future (2005), on science fiction and utopia, and Representing Capital (2011), a close reading of Capital Volume I, are among the best-regarded works of his last period. He died in September 2024.