Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998

Rating:
Summary: Not the best of Jameson
Review: I picked this one up because I thought it would be a nice relaxing series of short essays for a cross country plane trip. I was a bit disappointed. Its essays are of uneven quality, the first and last two being the best, and in order to get the little nuggets of pithy critical theory goodness out of muddled mass that is the rest of this book one has to do a bit of searching. In fact Cultural Turn was almost completely unmemorable, except for the interesting bit on architecture and spectrality in "Brick and the Balloon" (The last essay) and a few of the remarks on the myth of scarcity in the "Second World City" that are to be found in one of the first two pieces. Jameson's writing in Cultural Turn seemed crippled by a greater than usual density of language and jargon, unlike in Political Unconsious, which make several of these pieces tough on either the casual reader (like myself), or the reader who is not versed in Jameson's ideas or specific field of Marxist aesthetic critique. A good addition to other writings by Jameson and on various subjects, but not a pleasant escape or introduction.

Rating:
Summary: Not the best of Jameson
Review: I picked this one up because I thought it would be a nice relaxing series of short essays for a cross country plane trip. I was a bit disappointed. Its essays are of uneven quality, the first and last two being the best, and in order to get the little nuggets of pithy critical theory goodness out of muddled mass that is the rest of this book one has to do a bit of searching. In fact Cultural Turn was almost completely unmemorable, except for the interesting bit on architecture and spectrality in "Brick and the Balloon" (The last essay) and a few of the remarks on the myth of scarcity in the "Second World City" that are to be found in one of the first two pieces. Jameson's writing in Cultural Turn seemed crippled by a greater than usual density of language and jargon, unlike in Political Unconsious, which make several of these pieces tough on either the casual reader (like myself), or the reader who is not versed in Jameson's ideas or specific field of Marxist aesthetic critique. A good addition to other writings by Jameson and on various subjects, but not a pleasant escape or introduction.