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Kritika Kultura

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0001-5569-1166

Abstract

As a celebrated Marxist literary theorist and cultural critic, Fredric Jameson has been very influential and highly acclaimed in China’s academia for about forty years. One of his former undergraduate students, Robert T. Tally Jr., is now widely regarded as an inheritor of Jameson’s thoughts as well as his impact on China’s literary studies. Tally is especially valued for his spatial criticism, which, characterized by its distinct terminology and methodologies, builds upon Jameson’s intellectual legacy while also significantly moving beyond it. In the first place, Tally’s notion of space inherits Jameson’s view of history and space while also drawing on the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and Edward Soja, among others. Secondly, Tally’s literary cartography is largely inspired by Jameson’s cognitive mapping, but Tally’s notion of mapping places more emphasis on the subject’s existential situation and is conceived as the subject’s strategy to cope with their constant topophrenia. More importantly, Tally has constructed the theoretical framework of his spatial criticism with literary cartography as the core which connects his other spatial critical terms. Thirdly, Tally’s utopia studies are inheritance, advance, and critique of Jameson’s thoughts. On the one hand, Tally stands with Jameson in defending the critical power of utopia and views Jameson’s desire called utopia as a cognitive mapping; on the other hand, Tally’s stance on fantasy is a critique of Jameson’s, in that he refutes Jameson’s distinction between science fiction (utopian narratives) and fantasy while pointing out that fantasy has utopian properties and is a site for realizing the utopian impulse. Following Jameson, Tally explores much further with fantastic originality and develops his own spatial criticism, through which Tally has paid great tribute to Jameson’s intellectual contributions.

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