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The second episode contextualizing Fredric Jameson's lectures at the 1977 Institute On Culture & Society begins with a discussion of Jameson's controversial efforts to resuscitate György Lukács. From this begins a conversation about moment of high theory into which the Institute was inaugurated and the connection of that moment to the more recent method wars [24:00] , the specter of Foucault in Jameson's work [54:00], and how Jameson's models of ideological analysis intersect with his narrative theory and its centrality to Marxist practice [64:00].
For Side A of “The Jameson Tapes.”
If you prefer to listen to Jameson’s lectures first, they are: “Models of Ideological Analysis” and “Ideology: Marx & Lukacs”
Cast (in order of appearance):
Caleb Smith is Professor of English & American Studies at Yale University, as well as Chair of English. He is the author of Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction & Discipline in American Culture (Princeton UP, 2023) and “Goodbye to The Greatest Marxist Critic of Our Time” (The Chronicle, 2024).
Anna Kornbluh is Professor of English at University of Illinois, Chicago and the author of Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024)
Fredric Jameson was the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Institute of Critical Theory at Duke University.
Isabel Bartholomew is a PhD candidate in English at University of California, Irvine and the author of “What Was The Sitcom? On Grace Lavery’s Closures” for Los Angeles Review of Books. Her work with the Critical Theory Archive at UCI was essential to this project.
Robert T. Tally Jr. is Professor of English at Texas State University and the author of For A Ruthless Critique of All That Exists (Zer0, 2022) and Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (Pluto, 2014). He is also the editor of Verso’s Jameson at 90 series.
Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.
All music for this season of The American Vandal Podcast comes from the Tennessee-based roots ensemble DownRiver Collective. Most of the tracks come from their most recent EP, Off The Shelf. You can purchase it direct from the band here. It's also available on Spotify and Apple Music.
Tracks featured in this episode are “Wasted Time,” “Walls,” “Kettleridge,” and “Daylight Breaks.”
Episode Bibliography:
Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered” New German Critique (Autumn 1975) [trans. Anson G. Rabinbach]
Luis Althusser, “Ideology & Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970) in Lenin & Philosophy (Verso, 1971)
Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, et al, Reading Capital (1965) [2009 Verso Edition] [2016 Verso Complete Edition]
Elizabeth S. Anker & Rita Felski, Critique & Postcritique (Duke UP, 2017)
Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, & Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, & Free Speech (Fordham UP, 2013)
Nico Baumbach, “The Last Good Dad: On Fredric Jameson’s Pedagogy” Parapraxis (January 2025)
Stephen Best & Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction” Representations (Fall 2009)
Bruce Boone, Century of Clouds (Hoddypoll Press, 1980) [2009 Nightboat Books Edition]
Bertolt Brecht, “Against Georg Lukacs” New Left Review (Mar/Apr 1974)
Jacques Derrida, Writing & Difference (1967) [1980 U Chicago Edition]
Jodi Dean, Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism & The New Class Struggle (Verso, 2025)
Cedric Durand, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism (Verso, 2020) [French Edition, 2020]
Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian & Scientific (1880)
Terry Eagleton, Criticism & Ideology (New Left Books, 1976) [2006 Verso Edition]
Terry Eagleton, Marxism & Literary Criticism (U California P, 1976)
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of The Aesthetic (Blackwell, 1990)
Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of The Prison (1975) [1977 Pantheon Books English Edition]
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976) [1978 Pantheon Books English Edition]
Bryant Morey French, Mark Twain & The Gilded Age: The Book That Named An Era (Southern Methodist UP, 1965)
John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (U Chicago P, 1993) [30th Anniversary Edition]
Daniel Hartley, “Unintimidated Languages” Jameson at 90 (Verso, 2024)
G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of The Philosophy of Right (1820) [1991 Cambridge Edition]
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative As A Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell UP, 1981)
Fredric Jameson, “The Case For George Lukacs” Salmagundi (Summer 1970)
Fredric Jameson, Marxism & Form (Princeton UP, 1974)
Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism & Russian Formalism (Princeton UP, 1975)
Fredric Jameson, “Reification & Utopia in Mass Culture” Social Text (Winter 1979)
Fredric Jameson, “Marxism & Historicism” New Literary History (Autumn 1979)
Fredric Jameson, “Models of Ideological Analysis” 1977 Institute On Culture & Society
Fredric Jameson, “Ideology: Marx & Lukacs” 1977 Institute On Culture & Society
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke UP, 1992)
Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno or The Persistence of The Dialectic (Verso, 1990)
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism & The Consumer Society” [Original Version, 1983], revised and extended version published as first chapter of The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998)
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” New Left Review (July/Aug 1984)
Fredric Jameson, “Class & Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon As A Political Film” College English (April 1977)
Fredric Jameson, The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought To The Present (Verso, 2024)
Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist As Fascist (1979) [2008 Verso Edition]
Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s” Social Text (Winter 1979)
Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema & Space In The World System (Indiana UP, 1995)
Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory (Verso, 2009)
Fredric Jameson, Sartre: The Origins of Style (1961) [1984 Columbia UP Edition]
Fredric Jameson, Brecht & Method (Verso, 1998)
Fredric Jameson & Jason Demers, “The Theory Variations: An Interview with Fredric Jameson” Transatlantic (2023)
Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024)
Anna Kornbluh, “Extinct Critique” South Atlantic Quarterly (Fall 2020)
Anna Kornbluh, “We Have Never Been Critical: Toward The Novel As Critique” NOVEL (November 2017)
Anna Kornbluh, “Marxist Interpretation as a Vocation” Jameson at 90 (Verso, 2024)
Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, & Social Space (U. Chicago, 2019)
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Routledge, 1977)
Gaylord C. Leroy, “The Marxism of The Marxist Literary Group” Minnesota Review (Spring 1978)
Sylvère Lotringer & David Morris, Schizo-Culture (Semiotext(e), 2014)
George Lucas, Star Wars (1977)
György Lukács, History & Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923) [1972 MIT Press Edition]
György Lukács, Theory of The Novel (1915) [1974 MIT Press Edition]
György Lukács, The Historical Novel (1937) [1983 University of Nebraska Edition with Introduction by Fredric Jameson]
György Lukács, Tailism & The Dialectic: A Defence of History & Class Consciousness (1996) [2000 Verso Edition]
Sidney Lumet, Network (1976)
Karl Mannheim, Ideology & Utopia (1929)
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (1867)
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1932)
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964) [2003 Gingko Press Edition]
George Orwell, My Country Right Or Left, 1940-1943 (Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1968)
Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading & Reparative Reading” in Touching, Feeling (Duke UP, 2003)
Matt Seybold, “The Keynesian Theory of Jamesonian Utopia: Interdisciplinarity in Economics” in The Cambridge Companion To Literature & Economics (2022)
Matt Seybold et al, “Always Historicize?” The American Vandal Podcast (October 1, 2024)
Matt Seybold et al, “The Historical Novel” The American Vandal Podcast (October 18, 2024)
Matt Seybold et al, “Hangover From The Bad Old Days of High Theory” The American Vandal Podcast (August 14, 2023)
Matt Seybold et al, “Literary Sociology a.k.a. The Institutional Turn a.k.a. The Spreadsheet School of Literary Criticism” The American Vandal Podcast (July 15, 2025)
Matt Seybold et al, “Newspapers Worse Than Dead (But Print Is A Rent Strike)” The American Vandal (April 5, 2025)
Matt Seybold et al, “From Technostructure To Technofeudalism” The American Vandal (May 5, 2025)
Caleb Smith, Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction & Discipline in American Culture (Princeton UP, 2023)
Caleb Smith, “Goodbye to The Greatest Marxist Critic of Our Time” The Chronicle of Higher Education (December 11, 2024)
Caleb Smith, “Fredric Jameson: The Marxist Critic Who Remained Open To Mystery” The Yale Review (October 3, 2024)
Patrick Story, “The Spirit of St. Cloud: A Report” Minnesota Review (Spring 1978)
Robert T. Tally Jr., For A Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism (Zer0 Books, 2022)
Robert T. Tally Jr., Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (Pluto, 2014)
Robert T. Tally Jr., “Historicizing The Present” Jameson at 90 (Verso, 2024)
Robert T. Tally Jr., “Unhappy Is The Land That Needs Heroes: Remembering Fredric Jameson” E-CIBS (December 16, 2024)
Robert T. Tally Jr., “On Always Historicizing: The Dialectic of Utopia & Ideology Today” PMLA (May 2022)
Robert T. Tally Jr., Nicholas Brown, Maria Elisa Cevasco, & Fabio Durao (ed.), The Future of Totality: Fredric Jameson & The Prospects of Critical Theory (Duke UP, 2026) [In Production]
Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2024)
McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (Verso, 2019)
