Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality

Fredric Jameson

3.8/5 ( ratings)

The master of literary theory takes on the master of the detective novel

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 based on reconstructing 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 gigantic city built on deliberately ignoring nature, broken into a multitude of 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.

Pages: 96

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Verso

Release: August 23, 2016

ISBN: 1784782165

ISBN 13: 9781784782160

Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality

Fredric Jameson

3.8/5 ( ratings)

The master of literary theory takes on the master of the detective novel

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 based on reconstructing 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 gigantic city built on deliberately ignoring nature, broken into a multitude of 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.

Pages: 96

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Verso

Release: August 23, 2016

ISBN: 1784782165

ISBN 13: 9781784782160

More books from Fredric Jameson

Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

3.9/5 ( ratings)

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

3.8/5 ( ratings)

Aesthetics and Politics

4.1/5 ( ratings)

The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture

The Political Unconscious

Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions

The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998

3.9/5 ( ratings)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)

3.8/5 ( ratings)

Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature

4.1/5 ( ratings)

The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. 1

4.2/5 ( ratings)

A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present

3.8/5 ( ratings)

Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic

Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles

3.7/5 ( ratings)

The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit

3.6/5 ( ratings)

The Antinomies of Realism

3.9/5 ( ratings)

Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature

3.9/5 ( ratings)

An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol 2

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Öznellik Nedir?

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Rate this book!

Write a review?