Fredric Jameson — The Political Unconscious

49 published claims from this book.

• A novel’s ending can function as an object-lesson rather than a resolution
• A subtle terminological inversion reveals ideology’s work in interpretation.
• Art resolves real social contradictions through purely formal means
• Balzac’s moment precedes the full formation of the bourgeois subject
• Capitalism’s rupture with older social forms makes their myths undecipherable to us
• Conrad’s character typology rests on the activity-value opposition
• Deconstruction is a demand for a new hermeneutic model, not a rejection of interpretation.
• Dramatic irony derives from a gap between reader knowledge and character-deceiving appearances
• Expanding the interpretive horizon transforms the object of study itself.
• Formal sedimentation names genres as layered deposits of past ideology
• Frye extends meaning beyond the anagogic allegorical coding of humanity
• Frye’s ultimate meaning emerges when landscape becomes the human body
• Future readers will see today’s cultural monuments as children’s books
• Genre criticism becomes a creative enterprise when freed from canonical rigidities
• Greimasian semiotic squares generate narrative characters from logical combinations of semes
• Hermeneutics requires both suspicion and attentive listening
• History as ground must be conceived as an absent cause resisting reification
• History is only accessible through prior textualization
• Ideologemes remain narrative even when articulated as abstract beliefs.
• Ideology is the aesthetic act itself, not something that invests it
• Interpretive codes function as modes of attention directed at textual phenomena
• Jim’s encounter with the Patna pilgrims introduces an unprecedented human category for him
• Literary works generate the very situations they also react against
• Lukacs’ typification theory captures but incompletely explains character representation
• Marxism functions as the ultimate precondition for any literary comprehension
• Marxist cultural criticism must be class struggle waged within theory itself
• Mass cultural manipulation depends on genuine Utopian longings
• Modernist art redeems reification’s fragments as Utopian compensation
• Myth is what consciousness must overcome to become human.
• Myth’s formal features derive from its pre-individualistic social origins.
• Narrative categories like character and plot are the form of content, not content itself
• Narrative characters can be decoded as permutations of a semic opposition system.
• Narrative form itself, not author intent, generates ideological content.
• Narrative form registers objective crises in its own social raw material
• Nineteenth-century ideology shared a lexicon for transcending instrumentalization
• Psychoanalysis is the only truly new hermeneutic since medieval scriptural exegesis
• Pure empiricism in criticism is a contradiction in terms
• Purely immanent criticism, dominant since New Criticism, is an illusion.
• Religion represents the superstructural projection of earlier modes of production
• Romanticism embodies the neutral term in Balzac’s character system
• Schiller’s utopian synthesis of naive and sentimental art remained mere costume drama
• Social and desire-based interpretation begins only at the archetypal level
• Structural interpretation reads the gaps rather than the unified whole
• The ressentiment concept was devised to discredit political impulses
• Theological compromise concepts mediate between romance narrative and capitalist historicity
• Utopian desire can invest a comic grotesque body without ironic distance
• Value theory links Weber’s religious aestheticism to Nietzsche
• Weber’s scheme routes all institutions from traditional to rationalized via charisma
• Withheld secrets in realist narrative serve as preparation rather than resolution