Jameson, Fredric, 1934-

Fredric Jameson (b. 14 April 1934) is North America’s leading Marxist cultural theorist and critic. He is the Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of Romance Studies (French) and Director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University, where he has worked since 1985. Jameson has been the recipient of many awards throughout his career; some of the most recent and prestigious include the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize in recognition for, in the words of the awarding committee, his career-long research “on the relation between social formations and cultural forms.” Jameson was a central figure in the renaissance of Marxist literary criticism in the United States in the 1970s, and with his students at the University in California, San Diego he helped to found the Marxist Literary Group (MLG) in 1969. In the early 1980s his essays on postmodernity and late capitalism were seminal in grounding the concept of postmodernity in transformation in contemporary capitalism and became the center of intense debates.