Here's a quick index (for my own benefit, really) of the posts I wrote annotating my read-through of Jameson's latest book. Also: a link to my friend and colleague Bob Eaglestone's THES review. Bob liked it a lot. My initial bounce-off the book is less enthused than this, but it may grow on me as I ponder it.
One: chapters 1 and 2
Two: chapter 3 (Zola)
Three: chapter 4 (Tolstoy)
Four: chapters 5 ('Pérez Galdós'), 6 ('George Eliot') and 7 ('Realism and the Dissolution of Genre’)
Five: chapters 8-12
That's the lot. There's much here that is stimulating and even exciting; but much more than is clogged and obtuse and dreary. I wonder if the theory stuff Jameson is interested in ('affect', especially) isn't a fortiori a Romantic conceptual category, and mismatched rather to the post-Romantic, and in many cases deliberately anti-Romantic, 'realist' novels he's actually writing about? Perhaps that's a bold and brilliant interpretive strategy. Perhaps Jameson's just gets it wrong. Also: I felt I should have applauded the turn to SF at the book's end (for obvious reasons!). But actually it felt a bit meagre: as if Inception and Cloud Atlas is the best contemporary SF has to show for itself ...
It's left me in a rather sour mood; and since that's never the best state of mind in which to write a review I'll leave it a week or two before I start on that.
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