Program in Literature
Fredric Jameson, a cultural theorist and literary critic who influenced generations of scholars and helped raise the international profile of Duke University's literature program, died on September 22.
The Program in Literature mourns the loss of our colleague and friend.
Obituary from The New York Times
For decades, Mr. Jameson’s voluminous work — more than 30 books and edited collections as well as reams of journal articles — has been required reading for graduate students (and some precocious undergraduates), not just in literature but also in film studies, architecture and history.
Tribute from Duke Today
Jameson came to Duke in 1985 and for 18 years directed Duke’s Program in Literature, which in addition to teaching traditional comparative literature also focused on critical theory -- an examination of philosophical issues connected to culture and literature.
"There are very few other programs that do that," Jameson said in 2003, the year he stepped down as director. "I think we have a rather special reputation. … It's a program that doesn't have an equivalent anywhere else."
Jameson, the Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, frequently taught courses covering modernism, postmodernism theory and culture, Marx and Freud, and the modern French novel and cinema.
Tribute from The Washington Post
I do know that Jameson was the greatest intellectual titan of the past half-century who remained largely unknown to the general public. Where scholars such as Noam Chomsky and Umberto Eco broke into the wider culture in part through their activism or more popular writing, Jameson continued to express himself primarily through his more recondite academic treatises.
From his colleagues
“Since his arrival at Duke, Fred Jameson has been the centerpiece in the project that catapulted the humanities at Duke to national leadership.”
-Michael Hardt, Professor and Chair of Literature
“In the 1980s, he created the Literature Program at Duke in his image: a broad, welcoming home to faculty and students interested in analyzing and historicizing not just literature, film, and culture, but the world we live in. The atmosphere of complete intellectual freedom he fostered enabled me to find my own intellectual voice. It’s difficult to fathom that Fred no longer shares our world. But his work will live on."
-Toril Moi, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Literature
“Fred Jameson was the ultimate mentor in that he opened up every horizon for research, not just for those of us he taught directly, but for anyone who had access to his titanic body of work. He embodied the generosity and expansiveness of his own ideas, paying attention to every new student as he did to every new text and tradition. He kept going and growing because there was always more to learn.”
-Jed Esty, Ph.D. '96, Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania