ENGLISH

Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality

By Fredric Jameson

Book information

Publisher
Verso Books
Year
2016
ISBN
9781784782160, 9781784782153, 9781784782177, 2015029738, 1784782165
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
3 MB (3602149 bytes)
Pages
96\97
Time added
2022-01-08 20:16:14

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 neighborhoods 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.

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