"First, starting in the early 1970s, he led the effort to import into American circles the critical perspectives of Western Marxism..."

"... a diverse set of ideas, popular in France and Germany, arranged around the notion that culture was closely related to a society’s economic base, though not completely constrained by it.... Then, in the mid-1980s, he [applied] that same arsenal of ideas to... a critique of postmodernism, which, beginning in the 1970s, had taken hold in academic departments to describe what many saw as the breakdown of grand narratives about history, culture and society. In response, Mr. Jameson argued that postmodernism was itself just one more grand narrative, albeit one that tried to disguise its own status.... Postmodernism, he said, was special in that it signified the commoditization of culture itself, replacing history and progressive visions with irony, cynicism and pastiche, or mixing and matching cultural artifacts and forms without respect to their historical contexts. It meant... that 'our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and a perpetual change that obliterates tradition.'" 

From "Fredric Jameson, Critic Who Linked Literature to Capitalism, Dies at 90/Among the world’s leading academic critics, he brought his analytical rigor to topics as diverse as German opera and sci-fi movies" (NYT).