First published in 1961,
Sartre: The Origins of a Style
is a striking attempt "not merely to analyze Sartre's work formally , from an aesthetic perspective but above all to replace Sartre in literary history itself." As a study of Sartre's writings this work articulates the antagonism between the modernist tradition and Sartrean narrative or stylistic procedures. From the broader methodological perspective, Jameson turns around "the relationship between narrative and narrative closure, the possibility of storytelling, and the kinds of experience­ social and existential­structurally available in a given social formation."