The Modernist Papers
Fredric Jameson
A new perspective on Proust, Joyce, Kafka and others from a master of literary theory.Cultural  critic Fredric Jameson, renowned for his incisive studies of the  passage of modernism to postmodernism, returns to the movement that dramatically broke with all tradition in search of progress for the first time since his  acclaimed A Singular Modernity .  The Modernist Papers  is a tour de froce of anlysis and criticism, in which Jameson brings  his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of  the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jameson discusses modernist  poetics, including intensive discussions of the work of Baudelaire,  Rimbaud, Mallarm?, Wallace Stevens, Joyce, Proust, and Thomas Mann. He  explores the peculiarties of the American literary field, taking in  William Carlos Williams and the American epic, and examines the  language theories of Gertrude Stein. Refusing to see modernism as  simply a Western phenomenon he also pays close attention to its  Japanese expression; while the complexities of a late modernist  representation of twentieth-century politics are articulated in a  concluding section on Peter Weiss’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance.  Challenging our previous understanding of the literature of this pperiod, this monumental work will come to be regarded as the classic study of modernism.