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The moderns were interested in what was likely to come of such changes and their general tendency: they thought about the thing itself, substantively, in utopian or essential fashion.

— Fredric Jameson Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

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More quotes by Fredric Jameson

If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life.

Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.

Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture" has become a veritable "second nature."

Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.

The Seeds of Time (1994)

Edward Munch's painting The Scream is, of course, a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Fredric Jameson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.