In a far-reaching conversation with the critic Ryan Ruby, we unpack the legacy and impact of Fredric Jameson's landmark work of Marxist literary criticism, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Jameson's text argues for the explanatory richness and coherency of a Marxist hermeutical approach to interpreting the social function of the literary text. The guiding principle of Jameson's methodology is that any commentary that fails to historicize the narrative strategies at work as symbolic expressions of terrains of social conflict will be incomplete. Instead, he argues that we should view the interplay between the manifest content and historical subtext of the literary work as enacting imaginative "solutions" to social contradictions immanent to the dominant mode of production. In addition, we connect Jameson's historical materialist methodology to Ryan's new book of poetry, Context Collapse. Context Collapse is a playfully experimental work of philosophical verse that tells the story of the evolution of poetry in the Western tradition through the lense of information technology.

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