Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: landmarks
- 1 The literature of the Californios
- 2 The Anglo invention of Los Angeles
- 3 LA fiction through mid-century
- 4 British expatriates and German exiles in 1930s-1940s Los Angeles
- 5 Postwar Los Angeles: suburban Eden and the fall into history
- 6 Los Angeles and the African-American literary imagination
- 7 Pacific Rim city: Asian-American and Latino literature
- 8 The literature of urban rebellion
- 9 City of sleuths
- 10 Los Angeles’ science fiction futures
- 11 Hollywood fictions
- 12 The Southland on screen
- 13 Scenes and movements in Southern California poetry
- 14 Surf, sagebrush, and cement rivers: Reimagining nature in Los Angeles
- 15 Essaying Los Angeles
- Guide to further reading
- Index
15 - Essaying Los Angeles
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: landmarks
- 1 The literature of the Californios
- 2 The Anglo invention of Los Angeles
- 3 LA fiction through mid-century
- 4 British expatriates and German exiles in 1930s-1940s Los Angeles
- 5 Postwar Los Angeles: suburban Eden and the fall into history
- 6 Los Angeles and the African-American literary imagination
- 7 Pacific Rim city: Asian-American and Latino literature
- 8 The literature of urban rebellion
- 9 City of sleuths
- 10 Los Angeles’ science fiction futures
- 11 Hollywood fictions
- 12 The Southland on screen
- 13 Scenes and movements in Southern California poetry
- 14 Surf, sagebrush, and cement rivers: Reimagining nature in Los Angeles
- 15 Essaying Los Angeles
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
After several decades of inquiry, scholars agree that Los Angeles defies the conventions of urban theory. To some, it models a new paradigm of decentralized development, although others find in the city's sprawl extremes of the excess and deprivation characteristic of capitalist cities. Still others depict Los Angeles as the immigrant entrepôt of the twenty-first century. While detractors still dismiss it as one big movie set, recycling the myth of Tinseltown, in America (1988), Jean Baudrillard extends the notion of Los Angeles as a land of simulation beyond Hollywood by noting the effects on the regional life and landscape of such signature Southern California industries as informatics, genetics, the fitness industry, and New Age therapies. Like all cities, Los Angeles excites a range of emotions, but as the twelfth-largest urban area in the world, brimming with almost eighteen million inhabitants, Los Angeles remains fixed in the urban imagination. How do we know Los Angeles and where does that knowledge come from? This is a complicated question with too many easy answers. It has become a cliché, for example, to implicate Hollywood in spinning a marketable identity of Los Angeles through a century of film and television production. That “knowledge,” prone to distortion, hyperbole, and much mythology, is suspect, but the images rendered on television and movie screens nonetheless continue to shape popular understandings of the city.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles , pp. 177 - 190Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010