Inventions of a Present

By Fredric Jameson,

Book cover of Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization

Book description

A novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the naive reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation and, in the best and most intense cases, to propose a wholly new idea of what constitutes an event or…


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Why read it?

1 author picked Inventions of a Present as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Fredric Jameson (who died in September 2024), was a giant of the literary and cultural landscape. Famous for his work theorising "postmodernism," he was also an insightful critic of contemporary social history and our multimedia world. Inventions of a Present, one of his last books, offers a selection of scintillating essays on topics from across the face of modern cultural production, from Henry James to the TV show The Wire.

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