Late Capitalist Freud in Literary, Cultural, and Political Theory proposes that late Freudian theory has had an historical influence on the configuration of contemporary life and is central to the construction of twenty-first-century capitalism. This book investigates how we continue to live in the Freudian century, turning its attentions to specific crisis points within neoliberalism—the rise of figures like Trump, the development of social media as a new superego force, the economics that underpin the wellness and self-care industries as well as the contemporary consumption of popular culture—to maintain the continued historical importance of Freudian thought in all its dimensions. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, literary theory, cultural studies, and political theory, this book assesses the contribution that an historical and theoretical consideration of the late Freud can make to analyzing certain aspects of late capital.

The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics offers a comprehensive overview of Latin American aesthetic and conceptual production addressing the more-than-human environment at the intersection between art, activism, and critique. Fields include literature, performance, film, and other audiovisual media as well as their interactions with community activisms. Scholars who have helped establish environmental approaches in the field as well as emergent critical voices revisit key concepts such as ecocriticism, (post-)extractivism, and multinaturalism, while opening new avenues of dialogue with areas including critical race theory and ethnicity, energy humanities, queer-*trans studies, and infrastructure studies, among others. This volume both traces these genealogies and maps out key positions in this increasingly central field of Latin Americanism, at the same time as they relate it to the environmental humanities at large. By showing how artistic and literary productions illuminate critical zones of environmental thought, articulating urgent social and material issues with cultural archives, historical approaches and conceptual interventions, this volume offers cutting-edge critical tools for approaching literature and the arts from new angles that call into question the nature/culture boundary.

Ideologies of Theory, updated and available for the first time in a single volume, brings together theoretical essays that span Fredric Jameson's long career as a critic. They chart a body of work suspended by the twin poles of literary scholarship and political history, occupying a space vibrant with the tension between critical exegesis and the Marxist intellectual tradition. Jameson's work pushes out the boundaries of the text, making evident the interaction between literature and the disciplines of psychoanalysis, philosophy and cultural theory, all of which are shown to be inseparable from their ideological milieu. The essays in this volume track a shift from ideological analysis to the phenomenology of everyday life, and constitute a rigorous and passionate argument for the necessity of theory as the simultaneous critique of empiricism and idealist philosophy.

Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.

Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, opposes the view that literary creation can take place in isolation from its political context. He asserts the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts, claiming it to be at the center of all reading and understanding, not just a supplement or auxiliary to other methods current today. Jameson supports his thesis by looking closely at the nature of interpretation. Our understanding, he says, is colored by the concepts and categories that we inherit from our culture's interpretive tradition and that we use to comprehend what we read. How then can the literature of other ages be understood by readers from a present that is culturally so different from the past? Marxism lies at the foundation of Jameson's answer, because it conceives of history as a single collective narrative that links past and present; Marxist literary criticism reveals the unity of that uninterrupted narrative. Jameson applies his interpretive theory to nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts, including the works of Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad. Throughout, he considers other interpretive approaches to the works he discusses, assessing the importance and limitations of methods as different as Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, dialectical analysis, and allegorical readings. The book as a whole raises directly issues that have been only implicit in Jameson's earlier work, namely the relationship between dialectics and structuralism, and the tension between the German and the French aesthetic traditions.

This Critical Theory and Contemporary Society volume re-examines critical theory in light of the challenges raised by today's digital revolution.

Reflects the work of the Critical Theory Institute at the U. of California, Irvine, which, from the fall of 1988 to the spring of 1991, considered the topic Critical Theory, Contemporary Culture, and the Question of the Political. This volume consists largely of essays, by members of the group and invited guests, that were presented, discussed, and revised during that period. Paper edition (08057-3), $17.50. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR