A review on Modernism and ImperialismFredric JamesonBy: Ghulam MustafaRoll no: S-13-3407Assigned by Dr. Shahid ImtiazClass: M.Phil English Literature 3rd semester.LAHORE LEADS UNIVERSITY LAHORE.In the preface, Fredric Jameson raises some questions from the tense point of view as what is modernism, what is imperialism? That is a hot line for discussion among economists, historians and political domains. There are still doubts about the relationship between modernism and imperialism. Fredric abruptly talks about the literature of imperialism the literature written by Rudyard Kipling and E.M.Forster, Haggard, Verne and Wells are by and large not modernists. This kind of genre is called adventurous tales remained minor and marginalized during the hegemony of modern ideology during the hegemonic rule.The author states that the hypothesis were made to measure that imperialism left deep prints on the literature of the natives as whole the reply is yes. Imperialists not only produced their hegemonic literature to show their superiority over indigenous but also deeply affected the inner structure of the language of the natives in the name of modernism.There is another question, whether colonial literature will replace the modernism? Or it will coat with colorful galaxies, it can be explored chronologically that whether it is possible? Interrelationship can surely be sharpened even it has been restricted in any other way? There is discussion of privileged text and the subjective of the studies and its relation with imperialism, style and linguistic analysis and there are some more powers like political and economic as well.He (writer) states that there are some writers, we cannot restrict the topic within limitations of Marxism, political phenomenon and economic as well. He also connects modernism with western imperialism along with capitalism which can be cause of bloody scenes around the world. Wars have been fought to impose culture over the subjected, subjugated and conquered.He talks about Marxist theory of imperialism during World War 1. It is clipped Marxist capitalism or Marxist imperialism to do with the problems of third world countries. He gives examples like IMF and US investment to support the dictators to produce a certain kind of mentality to support the hegemony of the west in the present scenario of the globe, this is the question.He talks about colonial structure like marine and gunboats to capture and frighten the natives. He argues that Marxists support the imperialism in India as the result of imperialism is capitalism, capitalism is source of class conflict then people will fight and there is resistance that can be cause of the decay of the British imperialism.The problem of imperialism, its re-structured, the age of new colonialism, decolonization accompanied by emergence of multi-culturist, multi-lingualism, capitalism of new kind, rivalry of the metropolitans powers on the source of third world regions and under developed countries. He gives an example of the conflict between Japan and westerns that basis on the market imperialism and colonialism.This is an age of economical imperialism. He states that new metropolitans are also emerging with old, the simple example is Israel. The metropolitans made an agreement not to challenge the interests of other. He also argues that the imperialists make people consciously and deliberately mentally slave and believers as did British in India even today people remember the rule of Gora as a peaceful and fair age.He tells that it the need of hour to see the post war era with a new spectacle rather than decolonization and political independence. Many of us consider free but in reality, we are not free. We are still under the claws of imperialism a new kind of imperialism, a political as well as economical. The culture of the high societies has penetrated deeply in our nature and we feel as bad as they for certain things.According to him, there are some causes and effects of this shift that only changed shape not thinking, theory and practice. They have made think tanks to see the changing atmosphere of geo and mind.Imperialist are shyster players whose tactics are very mysterious and weird for a layman. The high culture is finding the culture of low a kind of threat. There are many movements among third world like black women movement, Harlem renaissance and post colonial writers belong to third world. Post-colonial literature has searched new world where new horizons are being made to meet the challenge. They are thinking about their survival.According to him, there is fear in the mind of high culture about to be conquered by exotic has resided. Now they are trying to create a certain kind of mentality to safe their position in the present changing atmosphere of the world.Although Conrad showed the heinous picture of Imperialism but there are some lapses as Chinua Achebe raised many points on it. He wrote Things Falls Apart in the reaction of Heart of Darkness.With the rise of imperialism, capitalism also emerged. Now the people have become commodities. They are the African who are working for the benefits of their owners willingly. Considering the impact of works likeThe Political Unconscious(1981) andPostmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(1991), Jameson hardly needs an apologist for his style or substance. The publications of his articles and books are intellectual events, and he has that unique power to change the terms of the discussion. His writing is unapologetically difficult and resists quick and easy consumption. And that is precisely the point: Jameson's densely packed sentences with their asides, corrections and elaborations have the effect of slowing readers down and making them think. Reading Jameson makes you aware of the fact that if sentences are, strictly speaking, linear, then thought, the motor behind them, is not. He has made a career out of writing what he calls "dialectical sentences". And as he explains elsewhere in a discussion of Adorno and Hegel, you can't think dialectically without writing dialectically.InMarxism and Form(1971), Jameson was already on to the idea that "quick reading" is a side effect of modernity. The mass production of the written word from the mid-nineteenth century onwards has generated a distracted mode of reading that can be aggressively undialectical. Words and images are consumed like candy and then forgotten. Siegfried Kracauer, in his analysis of Weimar cinema, argued that capitalism thrives on this kind of "distraction": when people are distracted, they tend not to think about the problems caused by capitalist modes of production, or their own position in the machine. Jameson's density is best understood as a deliberate attack on the distraction that comes with capitalism. It is an expression of intellectual intransigence that serves as "a warning to the reader of the price he has to pay for genuine thinking". Always historicize! This, of course, is the rowdy slogan that opensThe Political Unconscious. It is as familiar to literary scholars as "Start Me Up" is to fans of the Rolling Stones. The exclamation mark has always caught my attention because it is such a rarity in academic writing (and I would be willing to bet that this is the only work of literary criticism ever to begin with one!). When the book appeared, the exclamation mark signified an alarm bell that was meant to wake up Marxist critics (and anyone else willing to listen) who needed to reflect on their own methodological assumptions. If a Marxist approach to cultural analysis had any hopes of providing an "objective" (or totalizing) interpretation on cultural production in the future, then it needed to interrogate its embedded presuppositions. The effect was almost immediate. Jameson got critics, regardless of their theoretical allegiances, to think about how their ideas, categories and concepts are mediated by "interpretive traditions". He drove home the idea that every text is "always-already read", and every textual encounter always already mediated "by sedimented reading habits and categories". Jamesons interests are eclectic to say the least. He is as comfortable addressing architectural theorists and film historians as he is sci-fi junkies, and Lacanians. But over the years, modernist writers like Joyce, Proust, Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams have been a constant frame of reference for him. The Modernist Papers, a collection of twenty essays written between 1963 and 2006, documents his lifelong love affair with Modernism. Each essay is like the ring on a massive tree trunk marking a year in Jameson's incredibly productive life.Adorno, another influence on Jameson, was committed to modernist art, especially when it came to figures like Franz Kafka and Arnold Schoenberg. For him, formal experimentation in modernist art is an expression of fragmented human experience under capitalism. If you want to understand how capitalism crushes the subject into submission, then you examine, dialectically of course, the form itself: this is the place where the contradictions of capitalism can be found like the faded ink of tattoos on an aging body. A "healthy" artistic form is only possible if the concrete conditions in the real world change. Adorno, especially after his exile in sunny California, did not seem optimistic that they ever would, but the idea of the utopia remained a necessary precondition for the dialectic to take place at all. Without it, there is no way to construct what Jameson calls "an ontology of the present". Every essay inThe Modernist Papersis an occasion for Jameson to examine how, in a more general way, the global spread of capitalism has affected the way that texts have been written and read for the past century and a half. As he sees it, the literary-historical categories of realism, modernism and postmodernism correspond with the stages of capitalism (from pre-Fordism to flexible accumulation). Jameson's entire project has been an attempt to explain how the abstract social experience that comes with capitalism becomes absorbed, without the artist even knowing it, and then reflected in the form of the work itself.Stephan Mallarme is a central figure in Jameson's narrative about Modernism. He functions much in the same way that Charles Baudelaire did for Walter Benjamin, as the avant-garde artist fiercely antagonistic to, and yet complicit with, an emerging bourgeois commodity culture. "Mallarme Materialist" is a dazzling essay, and Jameson's talents as a close reader are very much on display here. He keeps his eye on the textual detail without losing track of the big theoretical question about the effect of capitalism on literary form. Jameson has been working on "Mallarme Materialist" for as long as he has been writing criticism. The date appended to the end of this essay, 1963-2006, is striking: either he's admitting to a protracted bout of writer's block, which is highly unlikely, or he's acknowledging that Mallarme has been a constant companion, someone who, by refusing to be outmoded, has helped him to theorize his own moment in the history of modernity. Whatever the reason, Jameson believes that this poet deserves a "post contemporary reinvention", one vital to the moment we are living in now.Jameson takes a materialist approach to Mallarme's Divagations and shows just how much experiments with the Livre (capital "L") were attempts to convey an alienated social experience. Commas, prepositions, blank spaces, paragraph breaks, conjunctions: the punctuation and syntax of every line are symptomatic of Mallarme's struggle to express himself. To understand just what this struggle involved, you concentrate on the sentence, the de facto unit of analysis for Jameson. The sentence (like the poem) is a constructed totality, one with the power to bring disparate objects and ideas into an associative relationship. "So strong is the power of the sentence", Jameson explains, "that we fail to notice the heterogeneity of its contents or the arbitrariness with which they are placed in relationship." Through this deformation of the textual apparatus Mallarme exposes the "power" that language and syntax have to make even the most arbitrary relationships appear natural.In "Modernism and Imperialism", an early and influential essay in this volume, Jameson explains that formal experimentation at the beginning of the twentieth century was a response to the emergence of an "imperial world system". Novelists like Forster, Woolf and Joyce experimented with techniques of spatial representation (and time) precisely because spatial experiences had changed so dramatically. With the expansion of the British Empire, London's economic reach was truly global. Londoners, who wanted to imagine "home", needed to confront the reality that they were connected to colonies, many of them thousands of miles away. For Joyce, it was the reverse. In Jameson's mind, his representation of the colonial city was a way of displacing the metropolitan centre and turning "the imperial relationship inside out". Jameson finds Empire everywhere in the modernist texts he reads: the casual reference to Java in Stevens, the mysterious omission of an episode in Proust, and the fragmented bodily sensorium in Rimbaud. Gertrude Stein is an interesting test case as well. Jameson argues that she conceived of literary form and the history of imperialism in the same dialectical terms of "inside" and "outside". How a text can ever be closed or completed, in other words, is not unrelated to the problem of how the British Empire could, as Stein put it in her Lectures in America, "have everything inside \[it\] all at once". Stein's enormous novel, The Making of Americans, is a manifestation of this dialectical problem: at once a reflection of American spatiality and an expression of the limits of a form unable to contain it.On the whole, the writer shows many domains, a certain kind of mentality, a new picture of the globe and new philosophy as well. He argues from different sources to show that a new kind of imperialism has emerged, but the practice and theory remain the same. Now they are making people slave through their economic policies and also maintain their political and hegemonic effect via weapons and the power of economy.