Literature and Race in Los Angeles

This is a study of the treatment of the city, specifically LA, in contemporary writing.

Julian Murphet (Author)

9780521801492, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 March 2001

214 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.6 cm, 0.34 kg

'This is a gripping, compulsive book. In its reading of the literary readings of Los Angeles offered by thriller writers, poets, and performance artists, Murphet makes a decisive contribution to the body of work that […] we have started to think of as LA studies. The book itself is commandingly written, each sentence deeply-pondered and finely tuned.' Stephen Connor

Los Angeles is both the most fragmented and the most minoritized metropolis in America, and its most luridly abstract and aestheticized city. With more than eighty-five languages being spoken in its classrooms, and one homogeneous visual language emanating from its entertainment industry, LA radically challenges the prospects of that archaic representational medium: literature. In its investigation of the work of Bret Easton Ellis, James Ellroy, Anna Deveare Smith and others, Literature and Race in Los Angeles articulates their aesthetic preoccupations with the structures of social space in the city. Harnessing some of the theoretical insights of Henri Lefebvre and the 'LA school' of geographers, Murphet demonstrates the versatility of literary production in LA and speculates about the fortunes of literature in a predominantly visual culture.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The representation of Los Angeles
2. Neo-noir and the archaeology of urban space
3. Postcards from sin-city
4. Cities within the city: Third world in the First
5. Realism and beyond
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary theory [DSA]