 |
A Multicultural
Exploration of Los Angeles
Writer's Resource Corner
||
Los Angeles Research Resources
||
Angelenos Yahoo Group
||
LA Times
||
LACC English Lab
 Welcome to a unique academic experience. “City of Angels: A Multidisciplinary Study of Los Angeles” examines the city’s essence and identity through the great works and lives of its writers, scholars, artists, filmmakers, historians, journalists, visionaries, and just plain folk. By studying LA’s history, architecture, environment and ethnicity, the last of which has earned it the identification as the American multicultural Mecca of the Twenty-first century, this course focuses on LA as one of the truly unique “wonder” cities of the world. It attempts, ultimately, to explain how Los Angeles, whose history has been built on contradictory poles of myth and reality (from the Spanish “sacred expedition,” the Yankee boosters’ “paradise found,” and even its seductive Mediterranean climate, to its earthquakes, overpopulation, wildfires, gangsters, bad cops and riots), reflects both the promise and betrayal of the American dream.
 After the city’s two huge population booms of the 1880s and 1920s, caused by a series of spectacular technological advances and sleazy backroom deals, the myth of El Dorado started to fade. The great Depression, refugees from genocidal tyranny in Europe and the American South, and victims of illness from the harsh climates of the East and Midwest, combined with the city’s unregulated growth, all helped produce the literary, cinematic and artistic anti-myth representation of a dystopian Los Angeles of the 1930s and 40s. Writers like Chandler, Fante, Fitzgerald, Huxley, Cain, West, Mann and Waugh all proclaimed the decline of modern civilization as evidenced by the physical and moral corruption of this once utopian paradise of Southern California.
Equally interesting, however, is the proposition that the Los Angeles myth is not yet extinct, attested to today by the world’s greatest migration of outsiders into one city since New York at the dawn of the last century. Though the orange groves themselves are virtually extinct, its Arcadian nature nearly spoilt, the city still seemingly offers multitudes the illusion of life as rapture in a place “somewhere over the rainbow.” Perhaps the myth is now forever embedded in LA’s historical consciousness. Yet while still an engine for peoples’ dreams of prosperity, the myth exists in direct opposition to LA’s ubiquitous realities: poverty, violence, and natural disasters. As the urban paradigm for the 21st Century, does Los Angeles present an ill-fated marriage of fantasy and reality, of good and evil co-existing in a great cosmopolitan stew? As many literary, cinematic and just plain realistic visionaries have warned, is LA aimlessly headed toward self-implosion as it bloats and sprawls like the belly of the beast?
As the above indicates, there is much to discuss when discussing Los Angeles. The “Course Description,” “Course Objectives,” and “Course Schedule” give a more detailed sense of the various texts, on-site excursions, and other resources we use to platform that discussion. In sum, “City of Angels” is an essential tool for students who want to understand the city and region’s “big picture,” and it is a fascinating course for outsiders who want to understand the nation’s most interesting and symbolically resonant city.
-- Professor John Giarelli
|
Or
do your
own L.A.
 search
!
Website maintained by: John A. Giarelli
URL: http://cityla.tripod.com/la.html
Last modified:
01/11/2008
|