1st Edition

Signatures of the Visible

By Fredric Jameson Copyright 1992
    360 Pages
    by Routledge

    360 Pages
    by Routledge

    In such celebrated works as Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson has established himself as one of America’s most observant cultural commentators. In Signatures of the Visible, Jameson turns his attention to cinema - the artform that has replaced the novel as the defining cultural form of our time. Historicizing a form that has flourished in a post-modern and anti-historical culture, he explores the allegorical and ideological dimensions of such films as The Shining, Dog Day Afternoon and the works of Alfred Hitchcock, among many others.

    Fifteen years on from its original publication, this remains a piercing and original analysis of film from a writer and thinker whose influence continues to be felt long after that of the fashionable post-modernists he has always critiqued.

    IntroductionPart1: 1. Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture 2. Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film 3. Diva and French Socialism 4. 'In the destructive element immerse': Hans-Jurgen Syberberg and Cultural Revolution 5. Historicism in The Shining 6. Allegorizing Hitchcock 7. On Magic Realism in Film Part2: 8. The Existence of Italy Notes Index

    Biography

    Fredric Jameson is one of the most respected cultural critics working in America today and one of postmodernism's most savage critics. Currently William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, he is the author of The Political Unconscious.

    'Jameson aptly demonstrates why he remains among the most significant literary theorists of the late twentieth century.' - Philosophy and Literature