Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism

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This brilliant critique explores the origins and emergence of postmodernism, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. His primary concern is less with the more intricate formulations of postmodern philosophy than with the culture or milieu of postmodernism as a whole. Above all he speaks to a particular kind of student, or consumer, of popular "brands" of postmodern thought. 

Although Professor Eagleton's view of the topic is, as he says, generally a negative one, he points to postmodernism's strengths as well as its failings. He sets out not just to expose the illusions of postmodernism but to show the students he has in mind that they never believed what they thought they believed in the first place. In the process his gifts for irony and satire sharpen the reader's pleasure, and his commitment to the ethical and the vision of a just society, inspire engagement and "a refusal to acquiesce in the appalling mess which is the contemporary world".

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998
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No one would contest that Fredric Jameson, one of the leading Marxist critics in the English-speaking world, has had an immense impact on the way we now understand the phenomenon of postmodernism. His classic work Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, has been widely acclaimed as the seminal analysis of postmodernity from a cultural, philosophical, and historical perspective. Jameson’s reflections have become an essential reference-point for all those attempting to engage with postmodernism. However, until now his key writings on postmodernism have been unavailable in an easily accessible and affordable form. This book, designed as a short and convenient introduction to Jameson’s thought for both the student and the general reader, meets this need. It includes: “Postmodernism and the Consumer Society,” Jameson’s classic analysis of postmodernity; “Marxism and Postmodernism,” in which Jameson responds to his critics; “Theories of the Postmodern,” his survey of alternative approaches; “The Antinomies of Postmodernity,” an extract from his recently published work, The Seeds of Time, in which he surveys the philosophical tensions embedded in the postmodern; “‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History’?” and “Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity,” two pieces hitherto unpublished in English on art and the image in the postmodern epoch. The Cultural Turn is an indispensable reference guide to the most arresting and substantial theorists of postmodernism.

Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions

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In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful?

Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson’s most substantial work since Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, investigates the development of this form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of utopian thinking in a post-Communist age.

The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness—alien life and alien worlds—and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson’s essential essays, including “The Desire Called Utopia,” conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.Archaeologies of the Future is the third volume, after Postmodernism and A Singular Modernity, of Jameson’s project on the Poetics of Social Forms.

Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002)

Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002)
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The concepts of modernity and modernism are amongst the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this new intervention, Fredric Jameson—perhaps the most influential and persuasive theorist of postmodernity—excavates and explores these notions in a fresh and illuminating manner.
The extraordinary revival of discussions of modernity, as well as of new theories of artistic modernism, demands attention in its own right. It seems clear that the (provisional) disappearance of alternatives to capitalism plays its part in the universal attempt to revive ‘modernity’ as a social ideal. Yet the paradoxes of the concept illustrate its legitimate history and suggest some rules for avoiding its misuse as well.
In this major new interpretation of the problematic, Jameson concludes that both concepts are tainted, but nonetheless yield clues as to the nature of the phenomena they purported to theorize. His judicious and vigilant probing of both terms—which can probably not be banished at this late date—helps us clarify our present political and artistic situations.

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
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The disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal consequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style, engender the well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche. This concept, which we owe to Thomas Mann (in Doktor Faustus), who owed it in turn to Adorno’s great work on the two paths of advanced musical experimentation (Schoenberg’s innovative planification and Stravinsky’s irrational eclecticism), is to be sharply distinguished from the more readily received idea of parody.
To be sure, parody found a fertile area in the idiosyncracies of the moderns and their “inimitable” styles: the Faulknerian long sentence, for example, with its breathless gerundives; Lawrentian nature imagery punctuated by testy colloquialism; Wallace Stevens’s inveterate hypostasis of nonsubstantive parts of speech (“the intricate evasions of as”); the fateful (but finally predictable) swoops in Mahler from high orchestral pathos into village accordion sentiment; Heidegger’s meditative-solemn practice of the false etymology as a mode of “proof” … All these strike one as somehow characteristic, insofar as they ostentatiously deviate from a norm which then reasserts itself, in a not necessarily unfriendly way, by a systematic mimicry of their willful eccentricities.
Yet in the dialectical leap from quantity to quality, the explosion of modern literature into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms has been followed by a linguistic fragmentation of social life itself to the point where the norm itself is eclipsed: reduced to a neutral and reified media speech (far enough from the Utopian aspirations of the inventors of Esperanto or Basic English), which itself then becomes but one more idiolect among many. Modernist styles thereby become postmodernist codes. And that the stupendous proliferation of social codes today into professional and disciplinary jargons (but also into the badges of affirmation of ethnic, gender, race, religious, and class-factional adhesion) is also a political phenomenon, the problem of micropolitics sufficiently demonstrates. If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself.
In this situation parody finds itself without a vocation; it has lived, and that strange new thing pastiche slowly comes to take its place. Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs: it is to parody what that other interesting and historically original modern thing, the practice of a kind of blank irony, is to what Wayne Booth calls the “stable ironies” of the eighteenth century.

Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory

Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory

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“One of the most challenging and stimulating books ever written.”—David Harvey
Postmodern Geographies stands as the cardinal broadcast and defence of theory’s “spatial turn.” From the suppression of space in modern social science and the disciplinary aloofness of geography to the spatial returns of Foucault and Lefebvre and the construction of Marxist geographies alert to urbanization and global development, renowned geographer Edward W. Soja details the trajectory of this turn and lays out its key debates. An expanded critique of historicism and a refined grasp of materialist dialectics bolster Soja’s attempt to introduce geography to postmodernity, animating a series of engagements with Heidegger, Giddens, Castells, and others. Two exploratory essays on the postfordist landscapes of Los Angeles complete the book, offering a glimpse of Soja’s new geography carried into its highest register.

Jeffrey Nealon, Post-postmodernism, or, The logic of just-in-time capitalism

Jeffrey Nealon, Post-postmodernism, or, The logic of just-in-time capitalism

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Post-Postmodernism begins with a simple premise: we no longer live in the world of "postmodernism," famously dubbed "the cultural logic of late capitalism" by Fredric Jameson in 1984. Far from charting any simple move "beyond" postmodernism since the 1980s, though, this book argues that we've experienced an intensification of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural life. If "fragmentation" was the preferred watchword of postmodern America, "intensification" is the dominant cultural logic of our contemporary era.

Post-Postmodernism surveys a wide variety of cultural texts in pursuing its analyses—everything from the classic rock of Black Sabbath to the post-Marxism of Antonio Negri, from considerations of the corporate university to the fare at the cineplex, from reading experimental literature to gambling in Las Vegas, from Badiou to the undergraduate classroom. Insofar as cultural realms of all kinds have increasingly been overcoded by the languages and practices of economics, Nealon aims to construct a genealogy of the American present, and to build a vocabulary for understanding the relations between economic production and cultural production today—when American-style capitalism, despite its recent battering, seems nowhere near the point of obsolescence. Post-postmodern capitalism is seldom late but always just in time. As such, it requires an updated conceptual vocabulary for diagnosing and responding to our changed situation.