The Ancients and the Postmoderns

Fredric Jameson sweeps from the Renaissance to The Wire

In his new masterpiece of cultural analysis, Fredric Jameson offers us an idiosyncratic examination of what might be called a provisional or disposable canon-what aesthetic history might look at as we enter an age of the immediate and of the unimaginable overpopulation of art and culture. With examples as far-flung as the great storytelling of the Renaissance painters, Wagner, Hamlet, Mahler's symphonies, twentieth-century American (Raymond Chandler, Robert Altman) and late modernist film (Kieslowski, Angelopoulos, Sokurov), science fiction (William Gibson), and finally the television series drama. Jameson shows the adaptability of artistic form. He ends with a final theoretical essay on the culture and economics of the pure present of late capitalism.