The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Origins of Postmodernity by Perry Anderson and The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 by Fredric Jameson
Thomas Hove

Perry Anderson. The Origins of Postmodernity. Verso, 1998. 143 pp. Paper: $16.00; Fredric Jameson. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. Verso, 1998. 206 pp. Paper: $16.00.

These two books are meant to be companion pieces, but each one in itself provides an invaluable background picture of the so-called postmodern world lying behind the literary, artistic, and other cultural expressions of recent times. Initially planned as an introduction to Jameson’s collection, Anderson’s genealogy of intellectual origins offers a series of succinct and energizing characterizations of attempts to define postmodernity. His range is international and covers various thinkers from the last six decades, from Federico de Onìs, Arnold Toynbee, and Charles Olson up through Ihab Hassan, Jean-François Lyotard, Jürgen Habermas, and Jameson himself, who emerges as the hero of this book. Nevertheless, Anderson’s overview of Jameson’s career contains several productive criticisms, chief of which is his charge that Jameson overemphasizes the role of economics and downplays that of politics in his theoretical program.
Literary-critical discussions of postmodernism tend to be tedious and trivial, but the multidisciplinary assessments by Anderson and Jameson are quite the opposite. Anderson’s two purposes are to trace the key changes in the idea of postmodernity and, less extensively, to speculate on the structural and geopolitical conditions that have produced both the idea and the changes. Jameson’s essays pursue this second endeavor more thoroughly, and they document numerous significant and startling links between postmodern cultural expressions and structural developments in global politics, society, and above all, economics. In its entirety, Jameson’s corpus on postmodernity attempts, by considering literature and other cultural expressions as “socially symbolic acts,” to present a totalizing historical reconstruction of the last few years of world history. Judging by the insightful and sometimes even mind-blowing essays in The Cultural Turn, Anderson may well be right in claiming that it offers the most satisfactory theoretical reconstruction to date. [Thomas Hove]