A period’s cultural stereotype is assembled from ideas of facts rather than facts themselves.

Evidence

There is a novel by Philip K. Dick, which, published in 1959, evokes the fifties: President Eisenhower’s stroke; Main Street, U.S.A.; Marilyn Monroe; a world of neighbors and PTAS; small retail chain stores (the produce trucked in from the outside); favorite television programs; mild flirtations with the housewife next door; game shows and contests; sputniks distantly revolving overhead, mere blinking lights in the firmament, hard to distinguish from airliners or flying saucers. If you were interested in constructing a time capsule or an “only yesterday” compendium or documentary-nostalgia video film of the 1950s, this might serve as a beginning: to which you could add short haircuts, early rock and roll, longer skirts, and so on. The list is not a list of facts or historical realities (although its items are not invented and are in some sense “authentic”), but rather a list of stereotypes, of ideas of facts and historical realities. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 610

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson distinguishes ‘ideas of facts and historical realities’ (stereotypes) from facts themselves — foundational for his later parody/pastiche argument about how periods get represented.
• XREF: The stereotype-vs-fact distinction anticipates his point that pastiche quotes stereotypes of style rather than style itself; ties to his earlier discussion of nostalgia films like American Graffiti.