Ernest Mandel
Mandel is the author of the book Late Capitalism which heavily influenced Jameson on his theoretical development. Mandel’s book delineates a three-stage framework for the development or evolution of capitalism stretching from the late 19th century into the 20th century: market capitalism, monopoly capitalism and a third stage which has various been described as imperialistic, post-industrialist, multinational and consumer capitalism.
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser is the author of the novels An American Tragedy and Sister Carrie. Jameson focuses the latter as example of the dissatisfaction which arrives with capitalism. Dreiser specifically creates a novel which examines the prison of “commodity lust” from which not only is there no escape, but within which there is no possibility for true contentment.
Edvard Munch
Munch’s famous painting “The Scream” is forwarded as the ultimate visual depiction of the cultural dissatisfaction about which Dreiser writes. Both are representatives of Jameson’s equivalent “second stage” of cultural capitalism. As he writes of Munch’s iconic portrait of twisted figure caught in the trap of social discontent, it is a “canonical expression of the greatest modernist themes of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation and isolation.”
Sir Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, by contrast, represents Jameson’s first stage: bourgeois romance. Walter’s historical novels are romantic rather than realistic in that they portray a finite vision of history as linear and psychologically non-complex. Scott’s novels represent this cultural period in that the point is to reinterpret history as an epic process dominated by mythic heroes into one in which the bourgeois class establishes itself as the dominant force of revolution and evolution.
E.L. Doctorow
Doctorow’s Ragtime presents a much more fragment view of history that is directly at odds with the very manner in which the romantic age viewed history. Where the denizens of Scott’s time could easily articulate a linear progression, Ragtime is illustrative of the post-modern manner of viewing history. Jameson’s third age, the post-modern era, applies modern sensibilities to analysis of history and thus cannot interpret is simply as a product of bourgeois revolution nor as existing exempt from modern values.
