California Dreaming

'A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest,' writes Joan Didion, 'remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.' From the Gold Rush to Hollywood to Silicon Valley, Yosemite to the Salton Sea, in this course we'll encounter a series of writers and artists whose work is set in California, or participates in its imagining, and throughout consider how culture and a sense of place are closely related. How does a novel, photograph, or film conjure a landscape or community? When we think of California, whose stories are included, and whose are left out? Possible texts: works by Mary Austin, Cesar Chavez, Mike Davis, the Depression-era Federal Writers Project, Rebecca Solnit, and John Steinbeck; films: Sunset Boulevard, Clueless, and There Will Be Blood; and the art of Carlton Watkins, Dorothea Lange, Richard Misrach, and Chiura Obata. For the final paper, students will write about a California place of their choice.