摘要：Fredric Jameson's 1984 essay on 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' provided an influential analysis of its historical moment, at the height of Frank Gehry's architecture, punk music, and Reaganite economics.1In his work, Jameson identified E.L. Doctorow's 1975 novel, Ragtime, as a benchmark for literary responses to the climate.2In a failed attempt to tell a coherent story about America as a nation of immigrants, Ragtime presents a bewildering array of characters, narrative styles, and fictitious and historical plots. The narrator tries — comically and ironically — to provide a historical overview that unites the fictional and the historical. However, the reader struggles to make any sense out of a patchwork of lives and narratives. Whilst a conventional historical novel tries to represent the interconnection between minor, private lives and public, historical figures, Jameson says that Ragtime is 'organized systematically and formally to short-circuit an older type of social and historical interpretation which it perpetually holds out and withdraws'.3For Jameson, the form of Ragtime is inadequate as a representation of the global flows of people, identity and capital that constitute modern society. He goes on to hypothesise an alternative 'aesthetic of cognitive mapping' that will better model political culture. Given the complexity of post-industrial capitalism, this form 'will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental organising concern', something the novel seems unable to do
