Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist best known for analyzing contemporary cultural trends and describing postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under organized capitalism. His interest in Sartre led him to intensely study Marxist literary theory. Jameson's influential article "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" analyzed postmodernism from a dialectical viewpoint, viewing postmodern skepticism towards metanarratives as stemming from intellectual labor conditions in late capitalism.

1. FREDERIC JAMESON
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political
theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural
trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of
culture under the pressure of organized capitalism.

2.  His interest in Sartre led Jameson to intense
study of Marxist literary theory. Even though
Karl Marx was becoming an important influence
in American social science, partly through the
influence of the many European intellectuals
who had sought refuge from the Second World
War in the U.S., such as Theodor Adorno, the
literary and critical work of the Western Marxists
were still largely unknown in American academia
in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
v

3. The critique of
postmodernism
 "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" was initially
published in the journal New Left Review in 1984, during Jameson's tenure as
Professor of Literature and History of Consciousness at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. This controversial article, which would later be expanded
to a full-sized book in 1991, was part of a series of analyses of postmodernism
from the dialectical point of view Jameson had developed in his earlier work on
narrative. Jameson here viewed the postmodern "skepticism towards
metanarratives" as a "mode of experience" stemming from the conditions of
intellectual labor imposed by the late capitalist mode of production.
 Postmodernists claimed that the complex differentiation between "spheres" or
fields of life (such as the political, the social, the cultural, the commercial, etc.)
and between distinct classes and roles within each field, had been overcome by
the crisis of foundationalism and the consequent relativization of truth-claims.
Jameson argued, against this, that these phenomena had or could have been
understood successfully within a modernist framework; postmodern failure to
achieve this understanding implied an abrupt break in the dialectical refinement
of thought.