Inventions of the Present: The Novel in the Crisis of Globalization

In his latest book, Fredric Jameson turns to dozens of writers—from Conrad to Marquez and Atwood—and shows that the novel does not merely “copy” reality, but instead reveals its hidden contradictions by constructing a “present” that no longer exists. For those ready to see literature as a tool for thinking and to master the approach of “materialist formalism,” this book will be an important intellectual discovery.

What happens to the novel amid the crisis of globalization? Why is literature of recent decades no longer able to speak by the old means?

In this book, Fredric Jameson analyzes novels by many authors and reflects on the figure of the writer—from Joseph Conrad and Vasily Grossman to Gabriel García Márquez and Margaret Atwood. For Jameson, the novel is not so much a mirror of reality as a means that makes it possible to capture the deep tensions and contradictions of the late-capitalist era.

Jameson rethinks the historical novel and offers his own method of “materialist formalism.” With its help, writers from different countries and times appear as creators of a “present” that no longer exists—but within which all of us still have to live.