Marxist Master Codes in Fredric Jameson’s Critical Theory | ||
| مجلة کلية الآداب بقنا | ||
| Article 17, Volume 31, Issue 54, January 2022, Pages 39-74 PDF (433.73 K) | ||
| Document Type: المقالة الأصلية | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/qarts.2021.89134.1179 | ||
| Author | ||
| Basma Hosny Ahmed Saleh* | ||
| A Lecturer in Literary Criticism English Language and Literature Department Faculty of Arts- Mansoura University | ||
| Abstract | ||
| Fredric Jameson starts his highly informative book The Political Unconscious with Wittgenstein's statement: “To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” For Jameson, this imaginative process is one of allegorical reading, rewriting, and interpretation based upon choosing a master code in light of which the reader reshapes the text. In this respect, not only literature but also and in a more effective manner criticism is seen as an endlessly imaginative and human process of reshaping the world in an ideological subjective way. The question is where do these endless ideological interpretations which reshape the pre-written course lead? Are they capable of getting us to a universal and an embracing perspective that has the aura of objective validity? This paper intends to propose a speculation of Jameson`s view to answer these questions. In expounding his critical theory, the paper hypothesizes that Jameson`s main focus is the idea of a master code he finds in Marxism which he considers a transcendental supreme demystification of reality. Applying a historicist and dialectic criticism he adopts not only in his The Political Unconscious but throughout his criticism, the paper attempts to prove that his Marxist approach is nothing but an ethical and religious one following the dialectic of absence and presence similar to Althusser's historiographical project of the production of the object. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| ideology; hermeneutics; utopia; historicism; dialectics | ||
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