ABSTRACT
Fredric Jameson provides an excellent illustration of the difficulty of assigning many of the most innovative contemporary critics to a single school or method. As a Marxist, Jameson insists on the individual work being part of a larger structure, and more importantly still, on its being part of an historical situation. More specifically, as Jameson's sub-title indicates, it is the critic's task to unmask the ways in which narrative is inevitably a 'socially symbolic act'. Jameson's attraction to Balzac may be presumed to stem originally from the special status that Balzac's work has enjoyed in Marxist discussions of literature. 'La Cousine Bette and allegorical realism' preceded Jameson's other two essays on Balzac by some ten years. In the essay on LaCousine Bette, Jameson is more concerned to focus on the 'over-determined' nature of the plot, and of the female characters in particular.
