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While his work was informed by a disciplined and steadfast political point of view — according to the essayist and Stanford professor Mark Greif, he was a Marxist literary critic “in a conspicuously uncompromising way” — it was not pious, dogmatic or ostentatiously topical.

Marxism was, for Jameson, both a mode of analysis and an ethical program

The novels, films and philosophical texts he wrote about — and by implication his own work too — could only be understood within the social and economic structures that produced them. The point of studying them was to figure out how those structures could be dismantled and what might replace them.

Jameson was as much a traditionalist as a radical. His prose is dense and demanding, studded with references that testify to a lifetime of deep, omnivorous reading.

For all his eclecticism he was, to a perhaps unfashionable degree, a literary critic, most at home in the old-growth forests of 19th- and 20th-century European literature, tapping at the trunks of the tallest timbers: Gustave Flaubert, Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, Thomas Mann.

why, as a critic, Jameson mattered to me. And maybe, more generally, to the nonacademic, not necessarily Marxist brand of criticism that I and some of my comrades try to practice in the throes of late capitalism, a phrase he helped popularize.

He identifies “this slogan” as “the one absolute and we may even say ‘transhistorical’ imperative of all dialectical thought.”

“Always historicize!”

the opening words of “The Political Unconscious,” Jameson’s 1981 book on “narrative as a socially symbolic act.”

we have not even raised the issue of gluten or the possibility of grated Parmesan. Or, more seriously, the unequal distribution of food in a consumer economy.

there is one, just two words long, that I’ve always thought would make a great inspirational forearm tattoo.

If you are a critic, professional or otherwise, the task before you is to make sense of an artifact of the human imagination — a poem, a painting, a dish of pasta, a Netflix docuseries, whatever

What does it mean? What is its value?

To find the answers, it helps to know something about where it came from. Who made it? Under what conditions? For what purpose?

Those may not be specifically Marxist questions, but they are historical questions, and they begin a process of inquiry that may lead to Marxist conclusions.

It exists in relation to (for starters) other works of literature and gastronomy, and it changes over time. And so, of course, do you

Reading a Shakespeare sonnet in middle age is not the same as studying it in school, and what it means in the 21st century is not what it meant in the 17th

Mapping that system and tracking its changes is the work of what Jameson calls “dialectical thought.”

To historicize your dinner you will need to take account of the voyages of Marco Polo, the European conquest of the tomato, the story of Italian immigrants in America and the rise of The New York Times cooking app.

But of course there is, properly speaking, no pasta without antipasto; no primo piatto without a secondo; no dinner without dessert. Those matters will also need to be investigated.

he principle is straightforward, even common-sensical.

rbidding idiom. (Transcoding; demystification; cognitive mapping:

Criticism, as he understood it, could never be, because of the complexity of its objects and its need to perpetually revise, refine and question its own procedures.