Mimesis, Expression, Construction brings Fredric Jameson’s seminar on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory into print for the first time.

Fredric Jameson is one of the world’s most influential cultural theorists. This volume, transcribed from audio recordings and edited by Octavian Esanu, contains Jameson’s 2003 Duke University seminar on Theodore Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, one of the most influential theories of modern art.

Composed in the form of a modernist play, Mimesis, Expression, Construction comprises twenty-one seminar transcripts. It introduces the seminars by using the key aesthetic concepts of mimesis (the drive to mimic reality); expression (the subjective urge to convey internal feelings); and construction (the objective form-giving principle of organizing the raw material in art). The play also aims to introduce Jameson’s ＂informal＂ thought as it manifested spontaneously in the classroom, and to compare his speech to his writing, which won him many accolades as a complex dialectical thinker of Marxist cultural criticism, art, aesthetics, and society.