The Modernist Papers Book

Essentially, this is a collection of Jameson's past essays on the subject of modernism. It's billed, correctly I think, as a companion piece or appendix to the much tighter volume A Singular Modernity. A couple of the pieces are classics - "Modernism and Imperialism," "Ulysses and History" - and a couple are new - "Joyce or Proust?" "The Poetics of Totality." The essays can be repetitive, at times, as they all revolve around themes of reification, fragmentation, and the dialectic between ideology and utopia (see The Political Unconscious). That being said, Jameson can produce quite interesting and insightful variations on these themes, as when he suggests that Wallace Stevens is a poet who abolishes poetry by blurring the lines between the poetic and theoretical. I would recommend reading this alongside A Singular Modernity, since these pieces all suggest a larger framework, which Jameson diligently provided in said book (i.e. what is modernism proper? what is "late modernism" or the "ideology of modernism"? what is the relation between modernism and modernization and modernity? and how is modernism geographically and temporally dispersed?). Finally, one could always hope that Jameson would pay a little more attention to what he once called "third-world literature" - it would be nice to see Jameson write more extensively on Marquez, Carpentier, or others. But that simply isn't what he is doing or, most likely, going to do, and there are other critics who do the job nicely. This is an excellent volume of essays, though it will never become a central piece in studies of Jameson.