Literary critic, critical theorist, philosopher, Marxist: Fredric Jameson died last month at the age of ninety. In his long career, he wrote more than thirty books and many more articles on literature, film, television, opera, and architecture, situating culture—popular and otherwise—within the “logic of late capitalism” (the subtitle of his perhaps most well-known book, Postmodernism, 1990). He was required reading for decades of graduate students—and the bolder undergraduates. We offer Jameson in his own words to demonstrate why.

“The Shining” from Social Text (1981):

Pastiche, in Adorno’s sense, must be radically distinguished from parody, which aims at ridiculing and discrediting styles which are still alive and influential: it involves something of the same distance from a ready-made artistic instrument or technique, but is meant, rather like the copying of old masters or indeed forgery, to display the virtuosity of the practitioner rather than the absurdity of the object (in this sense, late Picasso can be said to constitute so many master forgeries of “Picasso” himself).

Interview, from Diacritics (1982):

In undergraduate work one does not really confront the “text” at all, one’s primary object of work is the interpretation of the text, and it is about interpretations that the pedagogical struggle in undergraduate teaching must turn. The presupposition here is that undergraduates—as more naive or unreflective readers (which the rest of us are also much of the time)—never confront a text in all its material freshness; rather, they bring to it a whole set of previously acquired and culturally sanctioned interpretive schemes, of which they are unaware, and through which they read all the texts that are proposed to them.

“The End of Temporality” from Critical Inquiry (2003):

After the end of history, what? No further beginnings being foreseen, it can only be the end of something else. But modernism already ended some time ago and with it, presumably, time itself, as it was widely rumored that space was supposed to replace time in the general ontological scheme of things. At the very least, time had become a nonperson and people stopped writing about it.

“New Literary History after the End of the New” from New Literary History (2008):

Any talk about the future must first confront globalization as its absolute horizon: the term can have any number of synonyms. Marx called it universalization, but also the world market, a term that certainly remains useful for us today. As a stage of capitalism, I call it late, while others call it flexible or informational.

“Realism and Utopia in ‘The Wire’” from Criticism (2010):

The lonely private detective or committed police offers a familiar plot that goes back to romantic heroes and rebels (beginning, I suppose with Milton’s Satan)….

Plot construction is obviously a matter of practical importance in mass culture, as witness all the books and seminars on writing a script or a scenario, but it clearly has a theoretical or philosophical dimension that is not exhausted by these technical recipes and handbooks on the matter….

For where the modernist novel sought to flee repetition, or at least translate it into something more lofty and aesthetically worthy, mass culture thrives on what used to be called the formulaic: you want to see over and over again the same situations, the same plots, the same kinds of characters, with enough cosmetic modifications that you can reassure yourself you are no longer seeing the same thing all over again, that interesting twists and variations have freshened your interest. Yet a time comes when the paradigm succumbs under the sheer weight of the cumulative and the fatigue of the overfamiliar.

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