CSP 63 After the Gold Rush: Los Angeles in Fiction Since 1935

This seminar uses fiction to explore one of Los Angeles' most durable paradoxes: that it's simultaneously the most desirable and least satisfying of all American destinations, a paradise on earth bound to disappoint cruelly those who get there. Beginning with William Faulkner's cynical 1935 Hollywood short story "Golden Land," we will read works by several writers of the late 1930s and 40s, paying particular attention to the paradox in relation to the city's complicated histories of power and race. The final weeks of the semester and the final research projects will be devoted to exploring the ways in which some more recent writers have qualified or refuted this conventional binary representation of Los Angeles.