), a New York-born medical doctor with his own private practice, and Bernice née Ruff (c.1904–1966), a Michigan-born Barnard College graduate who did not work outside the family home.

[16] He completed a BA in French with highest honors at Haverford College,[17] where he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society in his junior year.

After graduation in 1954 he briefly traveled to Europe, studying at Aix-en-Provence, Munich, and Berlin, where he learned of new developments in continental philosophy, including the rise of structuralism.

He returned to America the following year to study at Yale University under Erich Auerbach in pursuit of a PhD, which was awarded in 1959 for a dissertation on The Origins of Sartre's Style.

Jameson would follow in these steps, examining the articulation of poetry, history, philology, and philosophy in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, who was the subject of his dissertation.

Marx highlighted immanent critique in his early writings, derived from Hegel's development of a new form of dialectical thinking that would attempt, as Jameson comments, "to lift itself mightily up by its own bootstraps".

Jameson marked his full-fledged commitment to Hegelian-Marxist philosophy with the publication of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, the opening slogan of which is "always historicize" (1981).

It borrowed notions from the structuralist tradition and from Raymond Williams's work in cultural studies, and joined them to a largely Marxist view of labor (whether blue-collar or intellectual) as the focal point of analysis.

[32][note 2] Jameson's establishment of history as the only pertinent factor in this analysis, which derived the categories governing artistic production from their historical framework, was paired with a bold theoretical claim.

His book claimed to establish Marxian literary criticism, centered in the notion of an artistic mode of production, as the most all-inclusive and comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding literature.

[36] Jameson joined in on the debate in 1984 with his article titled "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" that was first published in the journal New Left Review.

In Jameson’s view, postmodernity's merging of all discourse into an undifferentiated whole was the result of the colonization of the cultural sphere—which had retained at least partial autonomy during the prior modernist era—by a newly organized corporate capitalism.

[44] Relatedly, Jameson argues that the postmodern era suffers from a crisis in historicity: "there no longer does seem to be any organic relationship between the [...] history we learn from schoolbooks and the lived experience of the current, multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life".

[46][36] Some of Jameson's other well-known concepts and philosophical contributions —not mentioned in the preceding section or tangential to his critique of postmodernism— include the concepts of "cognitive mapping"[47] (adapted from Kevin A. Lynch; a form of class consciousness mediated by popular culture that corresponds to the era of capitalist globalization[48]), the "vanishing mediator",[49] totality as conspiracy,[50] "alternate modernity"[51] (the postcolonial notion of distinct regional pathways of capitalism, linked to the political project of BRICS[52]), and antagonism as the principle of totalisation.

[54] While the individual works are formally named on the flyleaf of Inventions of a Present, its more nuanced structure—six volumes comprising seven publications grouped into three subdivisions—can be gleaned from mentions in the books themselves.

[60] Alongside this project, Jameson published three related studies of dialectical theory: Valences of the Dialectic (2009), which includes Jameson's critical responses to Slavoj Žižek, Gilles Deleuze, and other contemporary theorists; The Hegel Variations (2010), a commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit; and Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (2011), an analysis of Marx's Das Kapital.

[68] In 2008, Jameson was awarded the annual Holberg International Memorial Prize in recognition of his career-long research "on the relation between social formations and cultural forms".

[69] The prize, which was worth 4.6 million kr (approximately $648,000), was presented to Jameson by Tora Aasland, Norwegian Minister of Education and Research, in Bergen, Norway, on November 26, 2008.

In mid-1985, shortly after the beginning of the cultural fever (early 1985 to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre)—a period in Chinese intellectual history characterized in part by intense interest in Western critical theory, literary theory, and related disciplines[71]—Jameson discussed the idea of postmodernism in China in lectures at Peking University and the newly founded Shenzhen University.

According to these critics, intellectuals, who conceived of themselves as the bearers of modernity, were reacting with shock and anxiety at their loss of control with the arrival of postmodern consumer society, uttering cries of "quixotic hysteria", panic-stricken by the realization of what they had once called for during the eighties.