Literature and Race in Los Angeles [Paperback]

This is a study of the treatment of the city, specifically LA, in contemporary writing.Los Angeles is both the most fragmented and minoritized metropolis in America, and its most luridly abstract and aestheticised 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. Literature and Race in Los Angeles is the first full-length attempt to think through some of the representational contradictions inherent in literary production in this city, and contemporary America at large.Los Angeles is both the most fragmented and minoritized metropolis in America, and its most luridly abstract and aestheticised 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. Literature and Race in Los Angeles is the first full-length attempt to think through some of the representational contradictions inherent in literary production in this city, and contemporary America at large.This book analyzes contemporary literature in Los Angeles in relation to the city's form, its visual character and its recent political history. Writers such as Bret Easton Ellis and James Ellroy are considered as responding to racial and ethnic partitioning in LA, as well as to increasing cultural homogeneity. Unlike other books on contemporary American literature, this book builds a composite portrait of a single literary scene in order to demonstrate the significance of writing in a tendentially post-literate culture, and the difficulties of literary representation in a city committed to visual representation.Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. The representation of Los Angeles; 2. Neo-noir and the archaeology of urban space; 3. Postcards l£$