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Raymond Chandler
The Detections of Totality
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Check link for latest rating. ( 156 ratings, 26 reviews)
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Format: Paperback / softback
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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
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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.
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
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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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