After Year Zero - by Fredric Jameson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Jameson's legendary lectures on German thought, brought together in one volume for the first time.

In this series of accessible lectures, Fredric Jameson explores German philosophy and critical theory as it de­veloped in the wake of World War Two. Focusing on key thinkers -- Horkheimer, Adorno, Heidegger, Habermas, Marcuse, Beuys, Enzensberger, Kluge, and Sloterdijk -- Jameson weaves close readings of texts with anecdotes and aperçus to craft a narrative about the uses of the­ory. He delves into world-historical phenomena, such as the legacy of Nazism and the formation of the European Union, in a story that stretches from the postwar division of Germany to its reunification at the end of the Cold War.

After Year Zero is a vital account of the German critical tradition, as understood by the "most significant Marxist thinker in American culture."

Review Quotes

"Jameson is one of the world's most eminent cultural theorists, but he is also a peerless literary critic in the classical sense of the term."
--Terry Eagleton

"Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today. It can be truly said that nothing cultural is alien to him."
--Colin McCabe

"The most significant Marxist thinker in American culture."
--Cornel West

"Jameson has long been the most alluring American literary theorist, the only one to match the French in style and depth."
--Angela Woodward, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Jameson thinks dialectically in the strong sense, in the way we are all supposed to think but almost no one does."
--Michael Wood, London Review of Books

About the Author

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital

Carson Welch is a doctoral candidate in Literature at Duke University. He is the editor of Fredric Jameson's The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present (Verso, 2024).