Over the last two decades, a steady stream of books exploring Fredric Jameson's voluminous career have solidified his place as one of the preeminent cultural critics of his generation. Ian Buchanan, Steven Helming, Adam Roberts, and Sean Homer have all written book-length studies of Jameson, and most recently Jeffrey Nealon attempted a sequel of sorts to Jameson's canonical Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Philip Wegner, who studied under Jameson at Duke, enters this growing corpus with a difficult-to-parse, but nonetheless illuminating, “intellectual biography” outlining Jameson's enduring value and utility (ix).

Wegner wants readers to see Jameson's work not as “a tool box filled with ingenious devices that one can deploy” but rather as “a new language: a living and richly dialectical language” that constantly interacts with other vocabularies and its cultural context (xxii). For Jameson, the demand for clear prose is “ideological,” so to systematize Jameson's writing undercuts its dialectical reversals and playful use of contradictions (19). Aware of this issue, Wegner consciously “betrays” Jameson by creating a series of useful axioms to analyse and interpret his huge oeuvre (4). Explicitly complimenting the famous opening words of The Political Unconscious, “Always Historicize!”, the first axiom Wegner offers is “Always Totalize!” (31). As with the call to historicize, to totalize for Wegner is a “synthetic and a narrative” tool (15). Wegner then establishes a series of “milestone” texts to situate Jameson's oeuvre along Jameson's own periodizing schema of realism, modernism, and postmodernism (186). Neatly falling a decade apart, Wegner traces Jameson's ideas from Marxism and Form (1971) to The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) and on to Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Wegner paints Jameson not only as a systematic thinker, but also as a writer dedicated to the preeminence of narrative, likening his works to “theoretical novels” (20).

Wegner argues that Jameson's “realist” text Marxism and Form should be “understood as a work that ‘unsticks’ both U.S. Marxism in particular, and contemporary literary criticism more generally” (42). In Jameson's modernist work The Political Unconscious, Wegner believes that Jameson offers “a highly original method – a recoding, rebuilding, and new language – for both Marxism and literary theory” (42). Wegner interestingly points out that “unity” defines Jameson's realist works, whilst “interpretation” – an interpretative act that “remains at a distance from the text itself” – defines Jameson's modernist phase (50). Regarding Postmodernism, Wegner defines Jameson's methods – such as cognitive mapping – as his means of producing narratives in the context of “the hegemonic postmodern” (78).

After Wegner “periodizes Jameson,” an “Interlude” outlines the profound influence of Greimas's semiotic square on Jameson's thought. Wegner masterfully builds this square into an easy-to-understand image of Jameson's unique Greimasian–Lacanian Marxism, imprinting the three categories of Lacanian psychoanalysis onto the Greimasian square. The fourth, unrealizable, condition of the square, and of Marxism itself, is shown to represent Jameson's consistent interaction with the concept of utopia.

Wegner then offers – as did Nealon – what seems to be the now obligatory chapter defending the purpose and utility of theory in an age that, they fear, wants to disregard it. But perhaps the crowning achievement of Periodizing Jameson is the final chapter concerning Archaeologies of the Future (2005).

Wegner argues that Archaeologies is Jameson's fourth milestone book, a period defined as “a ‘cultural logic of globalization’ or what we might call a ‘late postmodernism’: a negation of the negation of postmodernism” (186). It is in this chapter that Wegner's startling synthesis of Jameson's entire oeuvre is made apparent; Archaeologies is representative of the fourth milestone book, the fourth part of Jameson's Greimasian semiotic square, and “Marxism's fourth condition” (145). It is in Archaeologies that “Jameson reiterates … a point that has in fact been consistent throughout his writings: Marxism is Utopianism, and Utopianism is Marxist, or they are both no more than ideologies, expressions of particular fancies” (198). In this exhilarating reappraisal of Jameson's later work, Wegner situates Archaeologies as “an attempt … to recover a more radical modernism” (194). It is this radical, untimely, utopian modernism that Wegner argues defines Jameson's career.

Wegner's intimacy with Jameson's work leads to unexpected linkages between supposedly disparate texts. However, this very intimacy means that Wegner does sometimes overstate Jameson's importance. This valorization is clearest in the final paragraph, where Wegner situates Jameson in the direct lineage of Hegel and Marx: “This doesn't mean that there have not been heroic attempts, as with Hegel and Marx before him, to systematize aspects of his work, to create a named Jamesonian theory” (213). Despite this almost hagiographic tone, Periodizing Jameson persuasively argues for the continued relevance of Jameson's writing and methodology, and also provides useful new ways of understanding Jameson's contributions to literary and cultural studies.