The Antinomies Of Realism Hardcover – October 8, 2013

Look, there's no question that Jameson is a serious and important thinker. But the fact remains that he is not a good writer; he badly needs an editor, and it seems as though he is too famous for someone to stand up and tell him when a sentence doesn't work. There are many such sentences here.It's hard to know where to begin with the problems with this book. The breadth of erudition is impressive, but often haphazard, and authors are mentioned with no apparent purpose except that they occurred to Jameson as he was writing. There is a sense of self-assured free-assocation throughout. That, combined with some truly atrocious writing, frequent inconsistencies and contradictions, leaves little to hold the book together.And the assembling of the book seems to have been as rushed as the composition. There are typos throughout, inconsistencies in citation, transliteration, and translation (in one paragraph, a city is referred to by its Czech and German names; if you didn't know already what he was talking about, you could easily be confused about what was going on).The theory of realism itself, such as it is, is a parade of trendy topics in academia today, with little insight as far as I can tell, and a great deal of pomp. The part that would have been most useful to me -- the bibliography that captures the famously wide range of references -- is absent.

Fredric Jameson at his best! Who else could bring such immense erudition to a conceptual analysis of what appears to be his first love: the novel? With his characteristic and brilliant deployment of philosophical and political ideas developed over a lifetime of critical observations, Jameson takes a backward look at the notion of what's the real in the novels of Walter Scott, Zola, George Elliott, Twain, Faulkner, Tolstoy and many others. It's one of my own best books of the year.

This is not only an important book, carrying a thesis that open a vital discussion to literary theory concerned with the nexus between history and literature, but it also comes in a beautiful edition.

Great Quality of Product and Fabulous Service

What can I say; it's Jameson.

Brilliant. I would rate this five stars for the insights on Ulysses alone and it's relationship to Bovary; insights that had never occurred to me until Jameson pointed them out. The stuff on Elliott and existentialism is brilliant, as are the chapters on Tolstoy's short attention span.

Indispensable discussion.

Excellent service, book as advertised

I felt ill reading it. Not because of the money I'd wasted after a TLS review caught my interest but because, try as I might, I couldn't understand what sort of consciousness or intention lay behind the miserable word-screed trowelled so thickly onto the page. The appalling neologisms at every turn, the attempt to bend the meaning of words by giving them new (and indigestible) definitions of his own, the strangled determination to try and express more than he is actually capable of, the deadly greyness of the content, the total absence of a sense of humour: three times I made a determined effort to brave this horrible experience and three times I actually felt ill with the effort and had to stop. Thereafter I had to skim to protect my health.Only when he wrote about a paragraph or two about "Pulp Fiction" rather than Flaubert or Zola did a tiny glimmer of meaning appear - for an instant.My God.