The second part, ‘The Logic of the Material’, collects two previously published essays and one new essay, which concludes the book, drawing together arguments made in the preceding sections and presenting Jameson’s thoughts about the future of realism. The Antinomies of Realism comprises two parts, the first of which is also titled ‘The Antinomies of Realism’ and consists of an expansive new argument about the foundations necessary for the emergence of literary realism. With this new book, he turns his critical attention specifically to literary realism, and the results are fascinating.
Literature, art, architecture, film and popular culture are among the many ‘social forms’ broached in his often daunting, erudite, cross-referenced critical corpus. It is a point that he makes again early in this new work: ‘Realism, for or against: but as opposed to what?’įredric Jameson is a literature Professor at Duke University and a preeminent contemporary theorist with catholic interests. Various realisms take on their essential characteristics in determinate opposition to some other movement, so that a ‘realism’ which confronts classicism will be fundamentally different from one opposed to romanticism, and both from the one Lukács distinguishes from naturalism, and so forth. Stern’s On Realism, Jameson prepared us for his approach: This was true in the case of realism’s relationship to romance in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) its relationship to modernism in A Singular Modernity: An Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002) and its role as ‘an absent third term’ (the second being modernism) in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). It was an essential minor player, or a supporting antagonist, or even part of the back-stage crew, but never the central character it was never directly under the glare of his formidable critical spotlight. In Jameson’s many previous books, realism was always in the shadows.
Yet Jameson has not until now devoted an entire book to what he calls a ‘hybrid’ literary mode. It is not sufficiently iterated in commentary about this literary theorist best known for his powerful reading of postmodernism as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ that the concept of realism has always been an essential part of the scaffolding in his critical architecture.
With The Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson finally provides the sustained examination of literary realism that those following his critical writings have long suspected might one day appear.
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