Major Concepts

Dialectical Criticism 
interpretation
"On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act"
Metacommentary and Realism/Modernism Debate

Dialectical Criticism
does not isolate individual literary works for analysis; an individual is always part of a larger structure (a tradition or a movement) or part of a historical situation.  The dialectical critic has no pre-set categories to apply to literature and will always be aware that his or her chosen categories (style, caharacter, image, etc.) must be understood ultimately as an aspect of the critic''s own historical situation.--

e.g. point of view--a concept which is profoundly modern in its implied relativism and rejection of any fixed or absolute viewpoint or standard of judgment.

A Marxist dialectical criticism-- will always recognise the historical origins of its own concepts and will never allow the concepts to ossify and become insensitive to  the presuure of reality.
--will seek to unmask the inner form of a genre or body of texts and will work from the surface of a work inward to the level where literary form is deeply related to the concrete.
All interpretation is necessarily transcendent and ideological.  In the end, all we can do is use ideological concepts as a means of transcending ideology.
--three horizons of criticism--a level of immanent analysis, a level of socio-discourse analysis, and an epochal level of Historical reading--
(History itself is mirrored in the heterogeniety of texts)
The textual heterogeniety can only be understood only as it relates to social and cultural heterogeniety outside the text.

Interpretation: A Marxist dialectical criticism (or metacommentary; from Preface of The Political Unconscious)

- "Interpretation is here construed as an essentially allegorical act, which consists in rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive master code." (10)
-- will always recognize the historical origins of its own concepts, the "master codes" it uses, and will never allow the concepts to ossify and become insensitive to  the presuure of reality.
 --will seek to unmask the inner form of a genre or body of texts and will work from the surface of a work inward  to the level where literary form is deeply related to the concrete.

"On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act"

--"Interpretation is here construed as an essentially allegorical act, which consists in rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive master code." (10)
-- will always recognize the historical origins of its own concepts, the "master codes" it uses, and will never allow the concepts to ossify and become insensitive to  the presuure of reality.
 --will seek to unmask the inner form of a genre or body of texts and will work from the surface of a work inward  to the level where literary form is deeply related to the concrete.

• Criticizes two approaches to history: Antiquarian and Modernist (Structuralist)
• Three levels'' of Causality -- Jameson''s criticism of Althusser
  1.mechanical causality  (billiard ball causality)  applicable to analysis of local events
  2. Hegel''s and Stalin''s "expressive causality"
  --homogeneity of the levels and totalization
  3. Structural causality

• three horizons of criticism--from immanent analysis to transcendent one
  1. a level of immanent analysis, = text as a symbolic act
  2. a level of socio-discourse analysis, = text as class discourse
  3. and an epochal level of Historical reading = text as being embedded in a field of forces of the dynamic of various sign systems

• Other major ideas
  1. History as an absent cause: "it [History] is inaccessible except through textual forms. amd . . . our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious." (33)
     -- History as Necessity: "History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and set inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis. . . History as ground and untranscendable horizon. . . " (102)
  2. Ideologeme -- the discreet ideological unit found in the texts.  Ideology --strategies of containment (53)

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Metacommentary and Realism/Modernism Debate

a totalitarian view of history-- Like Hegel and Lukacs, Jameson historicizes literary productions and holds a totalitarian view of history. But Jameson takes into consideration not only the historical conditions of the literary works but also those of the literary critics. To him, moreover, literature disguises but not reflects, and the "absent cause" for the modes of literary production and criticism is ideology, instead of spirit or essence.

ideologies & meta- commentary-- All ideologies, to Jameson, are "strategies of containment" through which society provides an explanation of itself and suppresses the underlying contradictions of History. Literature as well as literary criticism is necessarily ideological. Whereas literature seeks to disguise ideological conflicts beneath its language or through its mechanism of censorship, a genuine criticism reveals the traces of censorship in literature, and also recognizes the historical origins of its own interpretive concepts or categories. This kind of criticism is what Jameson calls metacommentary, or dialectical criticism.

interpretation --All interpretation is a rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive master code (or chosen categories), and a dialectical critic is conscious of the historicity of his master code and tries to find out its historical origins. Marxism''s master code, to Jameson, is the "mode of production," which projects a total synchronic structure that transcends and demystifies the other critical methods.

The Marxist dialectical criticism also demystifies literary "great works." Instead of giving an immanent analysis of literary texts, it puts the texts into their historical context and tries to find out how and why they are symptomatic of the suppression of History. Dialectical criticism, in this sense, dissolves the reification of a literary text (or trend) back into its original praxis.

modernism --Jameson himself dereifies modernism and finds out its interrelations with the consumer society. On the one hand, modernist works are aestheticized reactions to the sordid reality of the consumer society: they are ways for the writers to manage their fears of the society, to disguise them, and drive them underground. On the other hand, modernism supports the economics of the consumer society (rapid production and consumption) by producing new shapes and patterns and by offering itself as a commodity. What Jameson does to modernism is, to borrow Gertrude Stein''s words, to "recover its ugliness" under its aesthetic surface.

Modernism/ Realism debate --In the Modernism/Realism debate, then, Jameson is on the side of realism. He denies the Frankfurt School''s belief in the negativity and subversive effect of modern works of art. Also, he is against centralizing modernism and placing the traditional literary forms (e.g. realism) in periphery. His method, instead, is that of Marxist historicism, which juxtaposes the limits and potentialities of our own socioeconomic moment with those of the past and allows the past to "judge" us. Modernism, therefore, is in no way superior to realism, both being a historical product of their times. There is, moreover, a dialectical relation between them, corresponding to that between classical capitalism and monopoly capitalism. Modernism denies, transcends, but also maintains realism; it is, in other words, a "canceled realism." Realism thus maintains a persistent validity in so far as ''classical'' capitalism continues to subsist as the fundation of consumer capitalism.

critique -- Jameson''s metacommentary, for me, both enpowering and problematic. Since every mode of literature as well as interpretation is necessarily ideological, metacommentary cautions us against the illusions a literary work may provide and reminds us to be aware of our own ideological position. As Jameson points out, "ideologies can...never be evaluated independently of their function in a given historical situation." The totality of life that realism presents through its interlocking structure, therefore, is not to be critiqued single-mindedly as some metafictionists do. The "plotlessness" of metafictions or their exposure of the artificiality of literary construction, on the other hand, may disguise their own sense of failure to deal with the postmodern world. (This is only a hypothesis.)
My question about Jameson''s metacommentary is that, since every interpretation is historically conditioned, how could a Marxist criticism "transcend" the other interpretive methods and be free from its own ideological limitations? How could a totalitarian view of history be possible for a historically situated individual?
 Although Jameson is right in adding a third term, postmodernism, to the Modernism/Realism debate, the correspondence he works out between classical capitalism, monopoly capitalism and a "multinational" capitalism on the one hand and realism, modernism and postmodernism on the other hand is to me too simplifying. And despite his claim to remove the ethical content from the opposition between realism and modernism, he himself does not refrain from evaluating modernism. It is true that both realism and modernism necessarily reflect the ideology they seek to disguise, but they can also be critical and subversive of their ideology (for example, Joyce''s Dubliners)--just as a Marxist can be critical of the others'' ideologies.
To Jameson, Marxism in the post-industrial world of monopoly capitalism should explore the "great themes of Hegel''s philosophy--the relationship of part to whole, the opposition between concrete and abstract, the concept of totality, the dialectic of appearance and essence, the interaction between subject and object."

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