Exploring Los Angeles through its literature

English Literature and Drama student Emily Morgan explores Los Angeles through the novels Play as it Lays by Joan Didion, Ask the Dust by John Fante, and through Charles Bukowski’s poems ‘Waiting’ and ‘Betting on now’, as part of her coursework for her module ‘Urban Jungles’.

Check out Emily Morgan’s LinkedIn profile here.

References (supporting materials):

• Borden, Iain, ‘Boundaries’, City A-Z, ed. by Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)
• Bukowski, Charles, ‘waiting’ and ‘betting on now’, Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, ed. by David L. Ulin (New York: The Library of America, 2002)
• Didion, Joan, Play It As It Lays, (London: Fourth Estate, 2011)
• Didion, Joan, ‘Why I Write’, The New York Times, (1976, Dec 5), retrieved from <https://moodle.brookes.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/2456766/mod_resource/content/3/355594162.pdf>, [accessed 15 December 2020]
• Dimendburg, Edward, ‘The kinetic icon: Reyner Banham on Los Angeles as mobile metropolis’, Urban History, (London: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Vol. 33, No. 1, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/44614174&gt;, [accessed 09 December 2020].
• Fante, John. Ask the Dust. (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012)
• Fine, David, ‘Chapter 1: Starting Points in Imagining Los Angeles’, Imagining Los Angeles: A City In Fiction, (Mexico: The University of Mexican Press, 2008)
• Fine, David, ‘Chapter 7: Down and Out In Los Angeles’, Imagining Los Angeles: A City In Fiction, (Mexico: The University of Mexican Press, 2008)
• Kirsch, Adam, ‘The pulp of poetry of Charles Bukowski’, Smashed, Vol. 81 Issue 4, pp. 132-136, (New York, New Yorker, 2005)
• Lehan, Richard, “Literary Naturalism and Its Transformations: The Western, American Neo-Realism, Noir, and Postmodern Reformation.” Studies in American Naturalism, vol. 7, no. 2, (2012), <www.jstor.org/stable/23431449.> [Accessed 15 Dec. 2020]
• Scruggs, Charles. “‘Oh for a Mexican Girl!”: The Limits of Literature in John Fante’s ‘Ask the Dust.’” Western American Literature, vol. 38, no. 3, (2003), JSTOR, <www.jstor.org/stable/43022257.> [Accessed 15 Dec. 2020]
• Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. “‘Play It as It Lays’: Didion and the Diver Heroine.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 24, no. 4, (1983), JSTOR, <www.jstor.org/stable/1208132.> [Accessed 11 Dec. 2020]