Mimesis, Expression, Construction: Fredric Jamesons Seminar on Aesthetic Theory

(Paperback, New edition)

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Mimesis, Expression, Construction brings Fredric Jameson's seminar on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into print for the first time. Fredric Jameson is one of the world's most influential cultural theorists. This volume, transcribed from audio recordings and edited by Octavian Esanu, contains Jameson's 2003 Duke University seminar on Theodore Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, one of the most influential theories of modern art. Composed in the form of a modernist play, Mimesis, Expression, Construction comprises twenty-one seminar transcripts. It introduces the seminars by using the key aesthetic concepts of mimesis (the drive to mimic reality); expression (the subjective urge to convey internal feelings); and construction (the objective form-giving principle of organizing the raw material in art). The play also aims to introduce Jameson's "informal" thought as it manifested spontaneously in the classroom, and to compare his speech to his writing, which won him many accolades as a complex dialectical thinker of Marxist cultural criticism, art, aesthetics, and society.

Reviews

Jameson on Adorno Its like reading Benjamin on Brecht, or Sartre on Baudelaire. A great Oedipal drama.
"Mind-blowing... What we get here is not the insight in some secret core of Jamesons thought lost in later gentrified published versions but, on the contrary, a flow of improvisations and mental experimentations where the detours through secondary topics are often more precious than the main line of argumentation."

Author Bio

Fredric Jameson (born April 14, 1934) is a prominent American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is currently Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies (French) and the director of the Center for Critical Theory at Duke University. Among his best-known titles are Marxism and Form; The Political Unconscious- Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act; Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; A Singular Modernity; Valences of the Dialectic; and The Antinomies of Realism. Octavian Esanu is an associate professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History and Director/Curator of the American University of Beirut Art Galleries. He is the author of What Does "Why" Mean; Transition in Post-Soviet Art; Art, Awakening and Modernity in the Middle East; Contemporary Art and Capitalist Modernization; and The Postsocialist Contemporary.