The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Perspectives)

Do you want a book about films you love written in a turgid academic jargon that drifts toward the unintelligable? No?Niether do I. Don't waste your money on this one folks. Why don't you just go see a movie instead.

I thought this was a stunning book. In contrast to the above reviewer I take pleasure in Jameson's prose style. I don't always understand what he's trying to say but I appreciate the rhythm of his sentences, the constant extension of the thought process.

Thanks so much!

I know that Fredric Jameson is highly regarded in LitCrit and CultCrit circles and rightly so: his longstanding project of extending a neo-Marxist style of interpretation and critique into the postmodern era is distinctive and provocative. As usual with Jameson, I think there may be some important ideas in this book as well, but I can't be quite sure. The reason for this hedge is that this work seems to me to be written in a style that is even more painfully turgid and willfully opaque than most of his other works. Single sentences sometimes form whole paragraphs, their length often further bloated by long parentheticals inserted into their interior. The writing is also rife with obscure references that are never explained or pursued and seem like gratuitous highbrow name-dropping. The overall impression is that Jameson seems deliberately to avoid ever saying in a few clear and revealing words or sentences (even occasionally) what can be expanded into masses of dense scholarly verbiage. This especially bothers me because I do think that, buried beneath these verbal heaps, are some important and challenging ideas. But, I literally found myself so overloaded and confused by the dense and structually confusing prose that I continually had to go back and scan whole sentences just to figure out their basic grammatical form -- not to mention the fact that by the time I reached the end of a 6 or 8 line sentence (of which there are examples on virtually every page), I had forgotten how it began. There's just no excuse for this type of elitist, exclusionary writing, especially for a person capable of quite clear and precise thought -- and more especially for a figure who positions himself as a neo-Marxist who might otherwise have a good deal to say to a more 'popular' audience. My suggestion would be that his publisher insist on a competent editor working over his text for simple readability -- or is this 'neo-Marxist' such an elite "name" that no publisher would dare propose this for fear of losing the author from her "stable"? Perhaps such a writing style is a result of the author's long engagement with other 'postmodern theorists,' but I, for one, don't think that the complexity of prose is any reliable index of the force of the ideas that it attempts to articulate -- quite the contrary.

very nice item