It took me a week to go through the preface and the first chapter. Every sentence was loaded with theoretical frameworks from either his own works from the 70s til the 90s (four-fold model from the Political Unconscious (1981), Marxist historicism from "Marxism and Form" (1971) and Ideologies of Theory (1984?), etc.) or the French post-modernists whom I didn't read (like Guattari's Transversality or Sartre's Analogon), so I had to pause at least a few times for each paragraph to look them up. I find it relieving to hear that the most important things to be said were stuffed in these dense 70-something pages. I honestly admire this guy for listing out all relevant references--which I find pedagogical, paradoxically but pleasant after all--and some of his reflections and insights accumulated from living through different cultures, languages, norms, and social environments to synthesize the conclusions least explored by and least expected from a Marxist critic (besides Global Communism or endorsing dialectics overall), which I couldn't have made out myself without the 80+ years of living spent on reading in three languages, joining the US army, teaching in China, writing extensive theories on the most abstracted regions to our intellectual traditions previously available. You won't hear what he says anywhere else, I guarantee.
Allegory and Ideology is Jameson's 'Truth and Method' (akin to Being and Time, or that and Nothingness-Gadamer is present for me, but this may be my allegorical reading). Comrade Marvin (speaker rather than host) was marvellous-host fab too, particularly for bringing football into it. Thanks so much! Really great.
It took me a week to go through the preface and the first chapter. Every sentence was loaded with theoretical frameworks from either his own works from the 70s til the 90s (four-fold model from the Political Unconscious (1981), Marxist historicism from "Marxism and Form" (1971) and Ideologies of Theory (1984?), etc.) or the French post-modernists whom I didn't read (like Guattari's Transversality or Sartre's Analogon), so I had to pause at least a few times for each paragraph to look them up. I find it relieving to hear that the most important things to be said were stuffed in these dense 70-something pages. I honestly admire this guy for listing out all relevant references--which I find pedagogical, paradoxically but pleasant after all--and some of his reflections and insights accumulated from living through different cultures, languages, norms, and social environments to synthesize the conclusions least explored by and least expected from a Marxist critic (besides Global Communism or endorsing dialectics overall), which I couldn't have made out myself without the 80+ years of living spent on reading in three languages, joining the US army, teaching in China, writing extensive theories on the most abstracted regions to our intellectual traditions previously available. You won't hear what he says anywhere else, I guarantee.
Allegory and Ideology is Jameson's 'Truth and Method' (akin to Being and Time, or that and Nothingness-Gadamer is present for me, but this may be my allegorical reading). Comrade Marvin (speaker rather than host) was marvellous-host fab too, particularly for bringing football into it. Thanks so much! Really great.
Great review