English Summary/英文概要： 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.

Awards/获奖情况： “Even the most anti-Marxian among us, [will] find ourselves compelled, if not to accept the book’s intricate hypotheses, at least to accord them an ungrudged admiration for the brilliance of their formulation and the serene and quietly convinced tone in which they are advanced.” – John Banville, The New York Review of Books

“Jameson, now 82, has long been the most alluring American literary theorist, the only one to match the French in style and depth. This bravura book stems from a long engagement — we might say obsession — with Chandler; what had been a footnote 30 years ago now unfolds with full force. Jameson makes every strand of Chandler’s oeuvre glisten with significance.” – Angela Woodward, Los Angeles Review of Books