The Desire Called Modernism

In 2005, Fredric Jameson published a career-spanning collection of essays on science fiction (implicitly, on popular culture), Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions; the volume under review here, The Modernist Papers, collects essays on the giants of highbrow, high-modernist literature (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Kafka, Mann, Joyce, Proust, Williams, Stevens, Stein . . .). So Jameson has reached that retrospective career-moment of retrieving uncollected essays for preservation in hardcover? - but these books don't merely gather old work: the first half (and more) of Archaeologies of the Future is a brand essay (233 pages) setting the stage for the twelve previously published pieces collected in the second half. Of The Modernist Papers, well over half is new in the sense of previously unpublished, though many of the pieces have been in the making for a long time. (One of the most stunning, Mallarme Materialist, is dated 1963-2006.) Neither Archaeologies nor The Modernist Papers offers any oeuvre-shaping hints,2 beyond the adviso that The Modernist Papers are meant to accompany my A Singular Modernity as a kind of source-book (x). But clearly Jameson is here laying a career capstone (a massive cantilevered lintel) in place, even as production continues with as much energy and brio as ever

Modernism