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Synchronous Coexistence and Temporal Overlay

JONATHAN CULLER is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, emeritus, at Cornell University. The author of numerous books on contemporary critical theory, including Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 1997), he most recently published Theory of the Lyric (Harvard UP, 2015). As a specialist in critical theory, I naturally read The Political Unconscious when it was published in 1981, and, seeing that it was clearly an important book, I collaborated with Leonard Green and Richard Klein on a special issue of Diacritics devoted to it, featuring essays by Hayden White, Terry Eagleton, Geoff Bennington, Satya Mohanty, Jerry Aline Flieger, andMichael Sprinker and accompanied by a substantial interview with Fredric Jameson himself (Green et al.). As we know, The Political Unconscious offers an extraordinarily sophisticated, comprehensive, nonreductive version ofMarxist theory and criticism. But it aims to do more: “One of the essential themes of this book will be the contention that Marxism subsumes other interpretive modes or systems; or, to put it in methodological terms, that the limits of the latter can always be overcome, and their more positive findings retained, by a radical historicizing of their mental operations” (47). The juxtaposition “of the ‘methods’ or approaches current in American literary and cultural study today,” Jameson writes,