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Raymond Chandler

The Detections of Totality
3.73 goodreads logo

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( 156 ratings, 26 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Raymond Chandler by Fredric Jameson explores the life and work of Raymond Chandler, a pivotal figure who bridges pulp fiction and modernism. Focusing on Chandler's iconic novel The Big Sleep, Jameson examines how the Los Angeles setting symbolises broader themes within American society, presenting it as a fragmented, sprawling cityscape marked by social divisions and an underlying threat of death. This work reveals Chandler’s transformation of the thriller genre into a metaphysical investigation of life and urban existence.
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Format: Paperback / softback
$4600

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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This book is ideal for readers interested in literary criticism, American culture, and the intersections of genre fiction and modernism. It will also appeal to enthusiasts of detective novels, urban studies, and those drawn to thoughtful, scholarly perspectives on literature.

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Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Raymond Chandler, a dazzling stylist and portrayer of American life, holds a unique place in literary history, straddling both pulp fiction and modernism. With The Big Sleep, published in 1939, he left an indelible imprint on the detective novel.

Fredric Jameson offers an interpretation of Chandler’s work that reconstructs both the context in which it was written and the social world or totality it projects. Chandler’s invariable setting, Los Angeles, appears both as a microcosm of the United States and a prefiguration of its future: a megalopolis uniquely distributed by an unpromising nature into a variety of distinct neighbourhoods and private worlds.

But this essentially urban and spatial work seems also to be drawn towards a vacuum, an absence that is nothing other than death. With Chandler, the thriller genre becomes metaphysical.

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Praised by critics like Terry Eagleton and Benjamin Kunkel, Fredric Jameson is recognised as a leading Marxist cultural critic whose insights bring a fresh and profound understanding to Chandler's work. Colin MacCabe hails him as one of the most important cultural critics writing in English, while others commend the book's intellectual rigor and eloquence. John Banville notes the compelling brilliance and conviction in Jameson’s analysis, which balances complexity with clarity.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781784782184

Publisher: Verso Books

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 05 July 2022

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Verso Books

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 7.0mm

Width: 140.0mm

Height: 210.0mm

Weight: 85g

Pages: 96

About the Author

Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.

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