History as a Narrative Categoryin Fredric Jameson

Abstract

History as a Narrative Category in Fredric Jameson Yang, Yu-mi (Kyung Hee University) This essay attempts to extend and critically sublate Jameson’s historicist understanding of narrative texts by engaging the theoretical underpinning that runs through the expansive range of his investigative endeavors: namely, his central hypothesis that “History is the experience of Necessity.” The notion of historical inevitability or “History as Necessity” is limited, I argue, to the extent to which such a concept necessarily eclipses or covers over the historicizing or temporalizing dimension of critical and textual practices, including the inaugural and originary impulse of figurative presentations (Darstellung). As a consequence, historical necessitarianism forecloses the possibility of a differential dimension in time. A developing theme of this discussion is the idea that as a historicizing as well as historical operation, the double orientation of origin points to a qualitative “leap” (Sprung), which immediately opens onto the possibility of a future in time, and is to that extent preconceptual: that is, it operates as a principle of subversion with regard to any synchronic determination of the field of history in terms of necessity.