Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction

Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (2000)
By David Fine

Synopsis: This book asks how LA, as a place, shaped the imaginations of novelists who wrote about it. Fine does this by surveying the various genres of L.A.-based fiction, ranging from early booster imagery and myth-making of the 1880s-1920s, hard-boiled 1930s, tough guy detective stories, the Hollywood novel, "down and out in LA," Black Dahlia and Zoot Suits, and apocalyptic lit. It's not very argument-driven, and seems that the bottom line is that L.A. has always been both a utopia and a dystopia. It has long been seen as a land of new beginnings and of opportunities, thus also seen ironically when these new beginnings turn out to be false. Interestingly, much of L.A. lit is by migrants, and not by those who have long been entrenched in the culture, which is what regionalist lit is usually like. L.A. is shown as a timeless and placeless "liminal zone" filled with odd architecture that embodies no dominant style. For a place so obsessed with the future, L.A. always seems to be recreating the past.

Interacts With:

City of Quartz, Golden State, Golden Youth, The City in Literature

Orientalism

Orientalism - Intro Only (2003 [1978])
By Edward Said

Synopsis: Said examines the exteriority of Orientalism - that is, its visible representation - in order to get at the origins of the use of Orientalism in the West, particularly as it relates to world political relationships and webs of power. He does this by looking at "style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, [and] not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to come great original" (21). Said argues that the Orient has helped to define Europe (and the West) via its position as a contrasting "image, idea, personality, experience" (2), hence the development of a dichotomy between the Orient and the Occident. This Western use of the Orient has allowed the West to dominate, restructure, and otherwise have authority over the Orient, a phenomena which has aesthetic, political, economic, sociological, historical, and philological dimensions.

Interesting Specifics:

Says "non-political" knowledge (such as literature) should not really be seen in such an apolitical way (10).

Orientalism is shaped by political, intellectual, cultural, and moral power (12).

Said is very interested in British, French, and American uses of the concept.

Interacts With:

In prioritizing only the image/representation, this book seems to be a straight-up myth symbol book.
References Gramsci's notion of hegemony.

Mythologies

Mythologies (1972; 1957 in French)
By Roland Barthes

Synopsis: French literary critic Barthes attempts to show the ways in which the bourgeois try to naturalize myth. Each chapter focuses on a different myth or symbol and discusses what that symbol/object has come to represent. Includes things like wrestling, fringe bangs signaling "Ancient Roman-ness," the platonic beauty of certain faces, wine, steak as symbolizing vigor, Einstein's brain as symbolizing man's triumph over nature, photos of political candidates, etc. "Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion" (129). "The naturalization of the concept...[is] the essential function of myth" (131). This is one of the goals of the bourgeois, to get people to see their ideas as true realities/facts, and not as the constructs that they are. If the bourgeois can get people to see myths as natural or as a matter of common sense, then they can control reality, in a way; can get others to believe that their (the bourgeois) system, is the naturally right and true system (this is my take on him, at least).

Interesting Specifics:

"Myth is a type of speech" (109).

Signifier + signified = sign

Signifiers: "Its form is empty but present, its meaning absent but full" (124).

"Myth is always a language robbery" (131).

"Myth is depoliticized speech" (143); it purifies things and "makes them innocent" (143).

"Myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts" (143).

"The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth" (146).

There are no left-wing myths.

"The foundation of the bourgeois statement of fact is common sense, that is, truth when it stops on the arbitrary order of him who speaks it" (155).

Interacts With;
Barthes is supposedly a structuralist (i.e. looks are things as eternal; ahistorical) on the cusp of poststructuralism. But, you cannot do poststructuralist myth and symbol because poststructuralism is all about being contingent on history, politics, class, conditions, etc; myth, by definition, transcends all these things.

Apparently Barthes believes that all myths are bad - no matter who wields them - because they are inherently oppressive.

The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape

The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (1996)
By Don Mitchell

Synopsis: "This book explores...the connection between the material production of landscape and the production of landscape representations, between work and the 'exercise of the imagination'..."(1). It basically seeks to "connect the shape of the CA landscape to the process of work that made it...and to wed a literature on landscape with that on labor history" (ix). One of main purposes is to interrogate the difference between representation and reality, and to put the reality of labor specifically back in to our understanding of landscape. Book begins around 1913 and travels through to 1930s through a series of vignettes and discussions of various bad working conditions, workers revolts, and the various attempts to disempower workers. Argument is that in order to make something a landscape, the work and labor behind it must be erased (and this has been particularly true of California which was created as a rural agricultural idyll). Landscape is thus inseparable from capitalist geographies based on commodifications of the land. Pain and work is hidden to produce a pretty image. California is shorthand for American Dream. Mitchell wants to reinsert workers' lives into the landscapes, highlighting their struggles. This is a Marxist labor history of California.

Interesting Specifics:

This book is essentially a labor history of the California landscape.

Follows Denis Cosgrove's line of thinking in that the history of landscape was "inseparable from the construction of capitalist geographies based on the full commodification of the land...and the subsequent need to represent ownership (or non-ownership) as a natural order of society" (4).

Says New Cultural Geographers have gotten too wrapped-up in representation and have abandoned "traditional concerns of geographers with material form" (5).

Landscape is "both a work and an erasure of work" (6).

Takes a very Marxist approach in his belief in labor as one of the defining features of humanity.

[I don't fully understand why the production of landscape should specifically hide labor more than other types of goods. Isn't the labor process hidden from the everything?? I guess this alienation is the central point of Marxism - but anything you don't make yourself is a repository of hidden labor.]

Has a great explanation of Carl Sauer and his view of landscape, that landscape "was the sum of its morphological components" - i.e. its buildings, populations, etc - and that one could understand a people by interpreting the landscape they created (24).

Says Denis Cosgrove led the shift in geography toward ideology and image (26).

Landscape as both a thing and a process/struggle (30).

Wheatland Riots of 1913 resulted when Durst farm workers rioted due to horrid living and working conditions; served to made workers visible and to bring labor problems to the public eye. Led to the formation of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing. The CCIH also held to the belief that bad environments led "triggered" innate bad genetic behavior, so they sought to "environmentally correct" for any such "outbreaks." Sought to hinder the anonymous mobility of workers (so common to the rotating crop pattern of CA) by watching them and increasing their feelings of accountability. A way to strip the power of mobility.

In CA, workers have to remain extremely militant in order not to be naturalized into the landscape.

Interacts With:
Ed Soja, Denis Cosgrove, William Cronon (Changes in the Land), "The Reinvention of Cultural Geography,"
This is a corrective both of "new cultural geography" and its focus on image, and of the "old" cultural geography of Sauer and its obsession with untheoretical morphology.