Fredric Jameson died on September 22, 2024, at age 90. Those of us who knew him are still in shock. For all of us, the loss is profound. Jameson’s towering importance for criticism and theory, and his centrality to the history of dialectical criticism, have been, and continue to be, eulogized around the world. His relation to the Marxist Literary Group and to this journal, both of which he founded, are for many of us more personal. He attended the MLG’s summer Institute on Culture and Society when he could, and many of our members will remember his debut of brilliant and sometimes startling new theses, and his patient, generous, democratic and comradely interest in and attention to the work of Marxist scholars of all generations.

For this special issue, we originally had the idea of making a selection of essays of Jamesonian inspiration that have been published in Mediations in the seventeen years since the journal moved online. There proved to be too many, and their quality too high; any selection would have been arbitrary. For a sense of Jameson’s enduring presence in these pages, we recommend simply typing “Jameson” into the search box at left and sampling for yourself the scores of essays that populate the results. Instead, we are reprinting Jameson’s own “A New Reading of Capital,” a talk he gave at the 2010 MLG-ICS in Chicago, which previews the argument of his crucial 2011 book, Representing Capital. Along with this we are reprinting reviews of three books by Jameson that are central to contemporary Hegelian Marxist literary criticism: Valences of the Dialectic (2009); The Hegel Variations (2010); and The Antinomies of Realism (2013). These provide a window — a small one — onto Jameson’s presence in these pages. For those with an interest in contemporary work inspired by Jameson, and in his engagement with some of that work, we recommend visiting the series of talks that took place this past April under the rubric “Jameson at 90.”

Jameson’s immortal part will endure in these pages and elsewere. For the part we knew, we can scarcely think it, much less write it: Farewell, Fred.

—Nicholas Brown and Maria Elisa Cevasco, for the Mediations Editors