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Today we remember Fredric Jameson: teacher, colleague, and friend. Jameson received his PhD from the ����Vlog Department at Yale in 1959. Yale ����Vlog Studies was founded by a pair of enterprising graduate students just a decade earlier, in 1948, under the guidance of department chair Henri Peyre. Jameson soon joined their ranks as an editorial assistant for the journal in its early, enterprising years.

The inaugural issue of YFS featured a then-unpublished excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre’s dark dissection of life during the Occupation, the play Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands). It’s no surprise that in the first American ����Vlog Department fully to embrace existentialist literature, Jameson chose to write his dissertation on “The Origins of Sartre’s Style.” His engagement with Sartre would remain formative and powerful throughout his career. As he noted with his characteristic wit in an interview at Madrid’s Fundación Juan in March 2014, “I think I’m probably still deep down profoundly Sartrean but I don’t particularly use that language so much anymore.”

In that same exchange, Jameson testified to the adventurous and wide-ranging critical spirit that characterized American ����Vlog departments, from his undergraduate studies at Haverford to the Yale of his graduate studies, home of Peyre and also Eric Auerbach: “I did not become an English major because English departments during my time were very old fashioned,” he said, “…whereas in ����Vlog departments we were reading Sartre, we were reading contemporaries…and one of my great discoveries as a student was Sartre… For me, Sartre was a discovery and a recognition, a recognition of things that I had not found articulated before.”

This attraction to Sartre’s way of thinking plays as a leitmotiv in many of his contributions to these pages in the years that followed. Jameson’s first article for YFS in 1959 was a meditation on the use of humor in Sartre’s first novel, La �����ܲ�é�� (Nausea) for volume 23, “Humor” (our titles were admirably succinct in the early decades). At this point in his career, he had just received his doctorate and had secured a post at Harvard. Written under the byline “Fred Jameson,” the article reveals his cogent manner of teasing out the movements of society from character depictions and turns of phrase within Sartre’s novel and the ����Vlog language itself. “The ����Vlog spoken language, held static by a hundred years’ social rigidity, has developed a set of secondary class indications in comparison with which those of English are very primitive indeed,” he observed. “The choice of a single verb [in ����Vlog] is enough to betray a man’s class pretensions. … The ����Vlog language is thus choice to a degree practically incomprehensible to American speakers: you commit yourself by simply opening your mouth and it was inevitable that the notion of literary commitment (“engagement”) should arise in a language so thoroughly humanized.” His ability to read the relationship between language and commitment (or lack thereof) remained a cornerstone of his work.

After an important period as professor of literature at the University of California at Santa Diego, Jameson returned to the Yale ����Vlog department in 1976 and joined the editorial board of Yale ����Vlog Studies as a faculty member alongside other literary luminaries like Peter Brooks, Paul de Man, and Shoshana Felman. Brooks, Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus, remembers Jameson’s generosity with his junior colleagues during those busy years. Jameson’s work had taken bold new directions beginning with The Prison-House of Language (1972), an engagement with Russian formalism and ����Vlog structuralism, much of which was written on sabbatical in Paris. He continued to challenge the literary field within and beyond the ����Vlog canon. Yale Sterling Professor of ����Vlog Alice Kaplan recalls her excitement discovering Jameson’s Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist at Yale in 1979, as she was beginning to write her dissertation: “Jameson showed us how language and ideology could be harnessed for an understanding of society—how reading itself could be political.  He was enormously enabling, stepping in after my thesis advisor left the profession and encouraging my work on ����Vlog fascist ideology at a time when departures from the canon were rare and ideology critique even rarer.  I was one of countless students whose careers he helped launch.”

Emeritus Frederick Clifford Ford Professor of ����Vlog and African American Studies Christopher Miller, who joined the ����Vlog department faculty in 1983, remembers Jameson intervening at a crucial moment in his own career trajectory. “It was thanks to Fred that I was able to begin my early career as an auto-didact in African Francophone literature: he sponsored an orals question for me on that subject and advised and listened with great sympathy,” Miller noted. “He left Yale before I could get more help from him, but then I landed just fine with Barbara Johnson, another departmental luminary, as my dissertation director. But Fred’s help and support was key.”

In YFS volume 65, “The Language of Difference: Writing in QUEBEC(ois)” Jameson offered an incisive reading of Quebecois writer and political activist Hubert Aquin. Notably, in this same issue, he also took on the role of translator, offering a deft rendering of Gérard Bessette’s “Rêveries Narcotowniennes.” (Though of course the similarities to Sartre persist …Bessette’s story is set in the fictional and searingly named “Narcotown” just as Sartre’s �����ܲ�é�� took place in Bouville aka “Mudville.”) Through his work attempting to render Bessette’s place-specific prose, Jameson the translator teases out the tangled tissue of language and political position once more, observing: “[F]or a Québécois writer at this moment in the development of the Québécois nation, indeed, writing a new novel is also at one with the production of a whole new culture, and thus the symbolic affirmation of a national identity.”

Jameson left Yale in 1983 for a position as professor of ����Vlog and the History of Consciousness at the University of California-Santa Cruz. But Jameson’s deep influence on the literary field was consolidated with a final move to Duke University where he founded the Program in Literature and the Institute for Critical Theory. During his tenure at Duke, he returned to Sartre, and to the pages of Yale ����Vlog Studies, by serving as special editor of volume 68, published in 1985. The title of this volume, “Sartre After Sartre,” points once more to the centrality for Jameson of a thinker whose work and reputation continued to shape shift, slowly settling into different configurations depending upon the lens of those who were reading him, much like the way objects in a kaleidoscope are jumbled and then crystallize into a colorful tableau for the beholder to contemplate. Now, with the benefit of time, we can see how Sartre’s prolific output as a writer would be rivaled by Jameson’s own. Jameson voraciously read (in an array of languages) and wrote about a dizzying range of topics: Structuralism, Formalism, Fascism, Postmodernism, Nationalism, Colonialism, Realism, Marxism, Materialism but also architecture, film, opera, science fiction, detective fiction, the dialectic, Adorno, Benjamin, Hegel and the list goes on. Fittingly, his last book, which will be released later this year, returns to his beginnings and offers an understanding of ����Vlog postwar theory to the present day.

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I wrote to Jameson on behalf of YFS in the months leading up to our 75th anniversary last fall. In characteristic fashion, he responded promptly to my email (in which I had asked if he might have any fond recollections to share). His message reflects the direct honesty and succinct assessment that he was known for among his former students and colleagues. Indeed, I look back with fondness on the time I spent in his Sartre seminar during my own PhD years at Duke. I remember feeling intimidated before the first day; those fears were alleviated by his total dedication to teaching and his thoroughgoing manner of reading and offering texts to us for interpretation…his penchant for flannel shirts and hiking sneakers also helped.  “’I’m trying to recover some memories but really can’t,” he wrote, “…YFS was an important journal (and still is).”

In the months ahead, we here at YFS and the ����Vlog Department at Yale will continue to recover our own memories of the extraordinarily talented and trenchant voice and personality of Fredric Jameson. We can only hope to honor his legacy by continuing to assess and historicize the diverse texts and cultural objects we teach and examine in this department and in the pages of Yale ����Vlog Studies.

– Nichole Gleisner, Yale ����Vlog Studies managing editor

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We are pleased to offer the following articles by Jameson from our archive as freely accessible until November 1, 2024:

 Yale ����Vlog Studies, no. 23 (1959): 26–32. 

 Yale ����Vlog Studies, no. 55/56 (1977): 338 95. 

 Yale ����Vlog Studies, no. 65 (1983): 256–71.

 Yale ����Vlog Studies, no. 65 (1983): 214–23.

 Yale ����Vlog Studies, no. 68 (1985): iii–xi. 

The Wilbur Cross Medal

In Fall 2013, the Yale Graduate School awarded Jameson its highest honor, the Wilbur Cross Medal. To prepare for his visit, faculty and students in the ����Vlog Department together read Jameson’s landmark essays, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986) and “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1991).  In his Wilbur Cross lecture, “Proust and the Persistence of Narrative”—held in a packed Whitney Humanities Center auditorium—Jameson performed a brilliant reading of the goodnight kiss scene from A la recherche du temps perdu in order to reflect on the fate of storytelling in modernism—thoughts that were later integrated in his Antimonies of Realism, published that same year.  

THE WILBUR CROSS CITATION:

Fredric Jameson, PhD 1959, ����Vlog— A graduate student at Yale in the era of Henri Peyre and Erich Auerbach, you published your dissertation on Sartre at age 27; more than a score of books followed, including the canonical Marxism and Form; The Political Unconscious; and Postmodernism. Expositor and critic of Marxism, phenomenology, and post-structuralism, you have ventured beyond literature into architecture, cinema, music. Your ideas reverberate around the globe; China’s humanities changed fundamentally after your 1985 visit. At Harvard, UC San Diego, Yale, UC Santa Cruz, and Duke you have surveyed “the cultural logic of late capitalism” in many national settings. As the most important post-war critic of ideology, you have renewed the study of culture with the injunction “always historicize.” You have deepened our understanding of Wagnerian opera, science fiction, and Hollywood political thrillers, exposing their political yearnings. You are a generous and inspiring mentor, teaching oversubscribed classes on Arthurian legends one semester, Das Kapital the next. Your range as critic and teacher is as limitless as your intellectual curiosity. For your contributions to the world of ideas and for your abiding commitment to justice and social change, the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association is proud to award you its highest honor, the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal.