"Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" by Fredric Jameson (1991)

In a word, it's exhausting. Which isn't to say it's unpleasant—there's actually a nice little (albeit peculiar) flow to this Marxist literary critic's entangled and far-ranging writing style. I'll start with this though: you get a clearer idea of whether his ideas on the tenor of our current culture hold any water now that we're 33 years out and the "postmodern" trends he identifies and argues for only seem to have exponentially exploded. Whether you're patient enough or primed enough to explore them is a whole other issue (I don't think I would have understood practically anything here if I hadn't taken myself through a university survey of literary theory a couple years ago, and that still didn't prevent a great deal of re-reading.) So why do I feel it's worth talking about if the book is so clearly difficult and esoteric? Well, attempting to take an all-encompassing, birds-eye view of the cultural era we currently live in—characterized mainly by gargantuan pluralization, fragmentation, and commodification—is frankly insane.* That Jameson does a pretty good job of it in a little over 400 pages is impressive, at least considering how many times he got me to pause and consider my own era (Have you ever spent an idle weekend considering your own era? Especially one as fucked up as this one?) There aren't many books out there that attempt to sum up THE ENTIRE STORY. And if that wets your whistle I'd say this is a pretty good one. I would think speeding through it on your one off-day away from the kids is out of the question though: you'd give yourself a stroke. Four stars.

*Here is the book's closing paragraph: "The rhetorical strategy of the preceding pages has involved an experiment, namely, the attempt to see whether by systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic, and historicizing something that is resolutely ahistorical, one couldn’t outflank it and force a historical way at least of thinking about that. 'We have to name the system': this high point of the sixties finds an unexpected revival in the postmodernism debate."