Fredric Jameson died on 22 September 2024, aged 90, at his home in Killingworth, Connecticut. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he was educated as an undergraduate at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, and as a postgraduate at Yale, where he studied under Henri Peyre and briefly Erich Auerbach. His doctoral thesis was later published as Sartre: the Origins of a Style (1961); as a graduate student he also travelled to Germany on a Fulbright Fellowship. Jameson was Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Harvard from 1959-67, the University of California, San Diego, 1967-76, Yale 1976-1983, the University of California, Santa Cruz, 1983-85 and Duke University, North Carolina, from 1986 until his death. In 2008, he was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize for academic scholarship in the humanities, in 2009, the Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award by the North American Society for Utopian Studies, and in 2012 the Modern Language Association Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement. He was married to Susan Willis, who taught in English at Duke, and with whom he had three daughters and one son (in addition to four children by previous marriages). Jameson supervised Kim Stanley Robinson’s University of California doctoral thesis on Philip K. Dick and is perhaps the only person in the science fiction community to refer to Robinson as ‘Kim’ rather than ‘Stan’, apparently because Robinson was too much in awe of his teacher to correct him.

In the ‘Introduction’ to The Ideologies of Theory Volume 1, Jameson described his intellectual trajectory as guided by the ‘vocation to explain and to popularize the Marxist intellectual tradition’ (p. xxvi). By Marxism he meant what Maurice Merleau-Ponty had described as ‘Western Marxism’, rather than orthodoxly Communist Eastern Marxism. This vocation is pursued through Marxism and Form (1972), which included chapters on Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse and Bloch, Lukács and Sartre, to Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (1990), as well as in an extensive series of essays and asides on literary theory and method. But Jameson’s most theoretically influential texts were The Political Unconscious (1981), Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005).

In The Political Unconscious he developed a systematic outline of a neo-Lukácsian ‘totalising’ critical method capable of subsuming apparently incompatible critical methods, by ‘at once canceling and preserving them’ (p. 10). Against more conventionally Marxian understandings of art as ideology, he argued for a ‘double hermeneutic’, which would simultaneously embrace both the negative hermeneutic of ideology-critique, understood in terms deriving from Louis Althusser, and the positive hermeneutic of a utopian ‘non-instrumental conception of culture’, understood in terms similar to those in Ernst Bloch. For Jameson, all art, indeed all class consciousness, could thus be understood as at once both ideological and utopian: ‘the ideological would be grasped as somehow at one with the Utopian’ he wrote, ‘and the Utopian at one with the ideological’ (p. 286).

In Postmodernism, Jameson expanded on an argument, originally outlined in a 1984 essay in the New Left Review, to the effect that contemporary postmodern culture provided the cultural corollary of Ernest Mandel’s globalised ‘third stage’ of multinational late capitalism. There are chapters on video, architecture, the novel, philosophy, economics and film, but none specifically on science fiction. Nonetheless, Jameson argues in passing that cyberpunk ‘is fully as much an expression of transnational corporate realities as it is of global paranoia’ and judges William Gibson’s work to be ‘an exceptional literary realization’ of postmodern reality (p.38). The essay and the book have been enormously influential across the humanities and social sciences, the book itself has been translated into thirteen languages and is still Duke University Press’s single best-seller. Jameson has also written on postmodernism extensively elsewhere, especially in The Seeds of Time (1994) and The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern (1998).   

In Archaeologies of the Future Jameson finally applied these theoretical insights to science fiction studies, a substantive area in which he had a longstanding specialist interest. That interest had generated a series of widely cited scholarly essays, from ‘Generic Discontinuities in Science Fiction: Brian Aldiss’ Starship’ (1973), through to ‘”If I Can Find One Good City, I Will Spare the Man”: Realism and Utopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy’ (2001). Many of these were first published in Science Fiction Studies and most were collected together in Part II of Archaeologies. The book is dedicated to Kim Stanley Robinson, Darko Suvin, Susan Willis and Peter Fitting, his ‘comrades in the party of Utopia’. Following Suvin, Jameson’s Archaeologies treats utopia as the ‘socio-economic sub-genre’ of science fiction. Like Suvin, it also expresses a clear antipathy to fantasy and to the kinds of dystopia it judged to be ‘anti-utopias’, paradigmatically Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The value of utopia as a literary form, Jameson argues, is in its capacity as ‘a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and … the systematic nature of the social totality’ (p. xii). Utopia, he concludes, is ‘a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right’ (p.232)

Fred smoked cigarettes for most of his adult life, which somehow didn’t prevent him from reaching the ripe old age of ninety. He was an immensely prolific writer and lecturer: in the year of his death he published two new books, Mimesis, Expression, Construction and Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization. He was also an inveterate international traveller, who visited every continent except Antarctica. But both the writing and the travelling have now sadly come to a full stop. We send our deepest condolences to his widow, Susan Willis, and to their four children, to his colleagues in the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University, and comrades in the North American Society for Utopian Studies.