Future readers will see today’s cultural monuments as children’s books

Evidence

In such a future, indeed, or from its perspective, our own cultural tradition-the monuments of power societies (for Goethe, the Iliad was a glimpse into hell) as well as the stories of fierce market competition and the expressions of commodity hist and of the triumph of the commodity form-will be read as children’s books, recapitulating the barely comprehensible memory of ancient dangers. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 2354

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: using Jameson’s lens to ask what our own canonical texts (the Iliad, Balzac) will look like from a post-capitalist future’s vantage — which currently-revered works encode the ‘ancient dangers’ of the commodity form.
• XREF: connects to: What was newly vivid to one generation reads as insipid to later readers — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 650