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CHICAGO REVIEW is pleased to announce the pub­li­ca­tion of issue 55:2, featuring:

POETRY by Simon Jarvis, Jean Valen­tine, Kristina Jipson, Pierre Joris, Eliz­a­beth Winder, Susan Stew­art, Andrew Zawacki, Rob Halpern, and Stéphane Mallarmé (Trans­lated by Peter Manson)

FIC­TION by Gary Lutz, Erika Mikkalo, and Matt Briggs

ESSAYS by Jen­nifer Moxley, Durs Grünbein and John Wilkinson

plus REVIEWS and a NOTE

To order or sub­scribe, visit:

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/

***

(our cover art is cour­tesy of Jes­sica Labatte and GOLDEN Chicago)

From Ben­jamin Kunkel’s review of Fredric Jame­son in the LRB:

Jameson’s descrip­tion of the mood and tex­ture of post­mod­ern life had, in its almost tac­tile author­ity, few rivals out­side the work of DeLillo, Pyn­chon and (more to his own taste) William Gibson. And, as in their novels, local obser­va­tion in Jame­son was com­ple­mented by an implaca­ble aware­ness of what he called the ‘unrep­re­sentable exte­rior’ enclos­ing all the slick and stream­ing phe­nom­ena in view. In the nov­el­ists, how­ever, allu­sion to the great enspher­ing system often took the form of para­noia. As a Marx­ist, Jame­son was calmer and more forth­right: he simply called the system late cap­i­tal­ism, after the book by Ernest Mandel, the Bel­gian Trot­sky­ist, which pro­vided the base, as it were, to his own cul­tural super­struc­ture. Mandel’s Late Cap­i­tal­ism (1972) had offered a mag­nif­i­cently con­fi­dent and pugna­cious argu­ment about the nature of post­war cap­i­tal­ism, but he regret­ted ‘not being able to pro­pose a better term for this his­tor­i­cal era than “late cap­i­tal­ism”’. In Mandel’s usage, ‘late’ simply meant ‘recent’, but the term nat­u­rally also sug­gests obso­les­cence. This impli­ca­tion of an utterly mis­placed Marx­ist tri­umphal­ism prob­a­bly had con­se­quences for the recep­tion of Jameson’s theory (and Mandel’s). Who could believe in 1991, when Jame­son pub­lishedPost­mod­ernism, or, the Cul­tural Logic of Late Cap­i­tal­ism, that cap­i­tal­ism was on its last legs?

In fact, Jame­son didn’t think it was either. His actual claim was more like the oppo­site: with the post­war elim­i­na­tion of pre-​capitalist agri­cul­ture in the Third World and the last residue of feudal social rela­tions in Europe, with the full com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of cul­ture (no more Rilke and Yeats and their noble patrons) and the infil­tra­tion of the old family-​haunted uncon­scious by mass-​disseminated images, humankind had only now embarked, for the first time, on a uni­ver­sally cap­i­tal­ist his­tory. Late cap­i­tal­ism was the dawn, not the dusk, of a thor­ough­go­ing cap­i­tal­ism. It con­sti­tuted a ‘process in which the last sur­viv­ing inter­nal and exter­nal zones of pre­cap­i­tal­ism … are now ulti­mately pen­e­trated and colonised in their turn’. This thesis can only have been rein­forced by the advent of China as the work­shop of the world and the chan­nelling of so much of inti­mate life by the inter­net. My shoes are sewn under the super­vi­sion of the CCP, and Gmail fills the mar­gins of my pri­vate cor­re­spon­dence with ads.

CHICAGO REVIEW

presents

A BILIN­GUAL READING

with

CHRIS­T­IAN HAWKEY

ULJANA WOLF

& MONIKA RINCK

to celebrate

ISSUE 55:1: SEVEN POETS FROM BERLIN

on

THURS­DAY, JAN­U­ARY 28th @ 6PM

at the

GOETHE-​INSTITUT CHICAGO

(150 N. MICHI­GAN AVE)

as well as an

ENCORE READING

on

SAT­UR­DAY, JAN­U­ARY 30th @ 7PM

at

MYOPIC BOOKS

(1564 N. Mil­wau­kee Ave.)

***

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CHICAGO REVIEW is pleased to announce the pub­li­ca­tion of issue 55:1: SEVEN POETS FROM BERLIN, edited and intro­duced by Chris­t­ian Hawkey.

Fea­tur­ing:

POEMS by Daniel Falb, Monika Rinck, Hen­drik Jack­son, Uljana Wolf, Stef­fen Popp, Sabine Scho, and Ron Winkler

&

TRANS­LA­TIONS by Chris­t­ian Hawkey, Nicholas Grindell, Nicholas Perrin, Cather­ine Hales, Susan Bernof­sky, J.D. Schnei­der and Andrea Scott

as well as:

FIC­TION by Jorge Edwards and Deb Olin Unferth

an INTER­VIEW with Jorge Edwards

ESSAYS by Jef­frey Yang and J.H. Prynne

plus REVIEWS and NOTES!

To order or sub­scribe, visit:
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/review

***

(our cover is cour­tesy of Andreas Töpfer)