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(Posted to FB by Tony McKenna. The colleague he refers to is me.)
Recently I was asked by Monthly Review Magazine do to a review of
Fredric Jameson’s new book on Raymond Chandler. I had not really read
Jameson before, so was looking forward to it – only it turned out that
he was one of these fashionable "superstar academics" who uses
ridiculously opaque jargon but offers very little by way of genuine
meaning. Naturally I wrote a negative review, which the magazine then
spiked – the review was fine, they said, but it wasn't their policy to
publish reviews of books they wouldn’t recommend their readership to buy.
Frustrating.
Wasn’t a total loss though. As part of my research, a colleague
recommended a book by Ernest Mandel on the detective genre which I had
never heard of before (‘Delightful Murder’). It provides a thoughtful
and clear historical account of the genre. And I was struck by the
difference with the Jameson book, and just how much kudos and props
figures like Jameson get. Here are two paragraphs: one from Jameson, one
from Mandel. I wonder how many people can guess which is which:
“when the Depression came, it gave fresh and frightening impetus to
crime of all sorts…The coming age of organized crime tolled the death
knell of the drawing-room detective story…an abrupt break with the
gentility of the classical detective story, especially with crime based
on individual psychological motives like greed and revenge.”
“hermeneutic activity (whether that of the textual interpreter or that
of Marlowe and other detectives) 1) as a ritual, as an activity whose
connotative meaning confirms and secures an ideology which greatly
transcends its immediate denotative intent (the immediate solution to
the enigma or problem); and 2) as a spatial form, that is, an activity
whose fundamental material organization is to be found in space (rather
than in cognitive categories”.
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