[csaa-forum] Fredric Jameson wins the 2008 Ludvig Holberg Memorial Prize

[Andrew Milner]

On Tuesday 16th September, at noon Central European Time, it was 
announced that Fredric Jameson, Distinguished Professor of Comparative 
Literature at Duke University in North Carolina, would be awarded the 
Luvig Holberg Memorial Prize for 2008. Professor Jameson has made 
important contributions to cultural theory and  cultural studies, 
hermeneutics, architectural and postcolonial theory, aesthetics, film 
and television studies. He is best known in the wider academic community 
for his 'Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' 
(1991), which many see as setting the terms for later academic debate on 
the subject. But 'The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially 
Symbolic Act' (1981) is almost certainly his most influential work of 
literary criticism and perhaps also the most theoretically original.

The Ludvig Holberg Memorial Fund was established by the Norwegian 
Parliament to raise the status of the arts and humanities, social 
sciences, law and theology. It awards the Prize annually at a formal 
award ceremony held in Håkonshallen, Bergen, on the last Wednesday of 
November. Recent winners have included Ronald Dworkin (2007), Shmuel 
Eisenstadt (2006), Jürgen Habermas (2005) and Julia Kristeva (2004). 
This year’s prize is worth $US 900.000 or 562.500 Euro.

Professor Jameson’s other books include 'Sartre: the Origins of a Style' 
(1961), 'Marxism and Form' (1971), 'The Prison-House of Language' 
(1974), 'Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist' 
(1979), 'Signatures of the Visible' (1992), 'The Geopolitical Aesthetic' 
(1992), 'The Seeds of Time' (1994), 'Brecht and Method' (1998), 'A 
Singular Modernity' (2002) 'Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire 
Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions' (2005) and 'The Modernist 
Papers (2007).

He is one of a significant group of late twentieth century comparatists 
- which also includes Peter Bürger, Franco Moretti, Edward Said and 
Gayatri Spivak - whose influence extended well beyond their own 
discipline to embrace literary and cultural studies more generally.

In December 2005 Jameson was the keynote speaker at a 2-day conference 
on the theme of 'Imagining the Future: Utopia, Dystopia and Science 
Fiction', organised by the Centre for Comparative Literature and 
Cultural Studies at Monash University to mark the publication of 
'Archaeologies of the Future', Jameson’s first full-length monograph on 
this subject. A collection of papers from this conference is available 
at: http://www.arena.org.au/ASSETS/imaginingFutureOrder.pdf


-- 
Professor Andrew Milner
Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
Monash University
Melbourne
Victoria 3800
AUSTRALIA

Phone: (61) (3) 9905 2979
Fax: (61) (3) 9905 5593
Email: Andrew.Milner at arts.monash.edu.au
Homepage:
   http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/cclcs/staff/milner/