Jameson’s first two major books reconstructed both Western Marxism and structuralist linguistics

Evidence

Two works had established him as the world’s leading Marxist literary critic, although he had already made the terms too restrictive. Marxism and Form (1971) was an original reconstruction, through studies of Lukács, Bloch, Adorno, Benjamin and Sartre, of virtually the complete intellectual canon of Western Marxism between History and Class Consciousness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason, from the standpoint of a contemporary aesthetics true to its many-sided legacy. The Prison-House of Language (1972) offered a complementary account of the linguistic model developed by Saussure and its projections in Russian formalism and French structuralism, concluding with the semiotics of Barthes and Greimas: an admiring but stringent survey of the merits and limits of a synchronic tradition that set its face against the temptations of temporality. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 139

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets up the two poles of Jameson’s formation - the Marxian canon and the Saussurian linguistic model.
• XREF: connects to: Jameson’s postmodernism theory is the culminating synthesis of Western Marxism. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 178

Broader Connections

• Jameson’s postmodernism theory is the culminating synthesis of Western Marxism. #expands (0.78) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 178