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UCLA professor Blake Allmendinger lectures during his course in California literature. The state's films and television shows may be better-known, but its literary traditions should also be celebrated, Allmendinger says. (Gary Friedman, Los Angeles Times / October 3, 2011) |
Marietta College, a small liberal arts school in southeastern Ohio, is 2,200 miles and a cultural universe from San Francisco.
But for English professor Beverly Hogue, the allure of California as a place of dreams and dashed hopes is powerful.
So last spring, Hogue led a class of literature students across the country on a weeklong trip to scour the Chinatown alleys of Maxine Hong Kingston, the poetry shelves at City Lights Bookstore and the misty hills of John Steinbeck's Salinas.
"The popular culture's image of California is a place where anything can happen," Hogue said. "We still see it as a place of possibility."
The pilgrimage was born from a surge of interest in California literature on college campuses across the nation.
Boosted by a new generation of students eager to explore the state's confluence of luxury and despair, of exploration and reinvention, courses in California Lit have popped up in schools such as Bowling Green University in Ohio and Carleton College in Minnesota as well as UC, Cal State and private campuses in California.
The courses often focus on the tension between California as a fantasized place of new beginnings and the harsh disappointments that follow. They explore how fictional works unfold against a natural backdrop that combines beguiling beauty and the ever-present threat of earthquakes and fires.
Those contradictions offer a bounty of possibilities for courses with names such as "California Stories" (UC Berkeley), "Visions of California" (Carleton), "California Dreaming" (Marietta), "Literature of California" (USC), "Mythmaking and Los Angeles" (Mount St. Mary's College) and "Global California: Crisis and Creativity" (UC Santa Barbara).
Rosemary Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Assn., an organization of professors of literature and foreign languages, said California Lit courses seem to be proliferating, an observation echoed by professors who said such classes were a rarity a decade or so ago.
The publication of several anthologies of California and Los Angeles literature has made it easier for instructors to assign a variety of works in a single semester, whether Mark Twain's whimsical Gold Rush memoirs or Walter Mosley's gritty L.A. detective novels.
The courses resonate with students who, even if they have never set foot in the state, have been immersed in images of California from movies, television and music.
"A lot of students have never been to California, but everybody dreams of California," said Nancy Cook, an English professor at the University of Montana and co-president of the Western Literature Assn. "It's just such a rich fantasy space. And it's also interesting to teach."
Student Laura A. Moseley, who is taking a class on California authors at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, said it has to do with learning about what's ahead.
"What happens in California eventually gets to everywhere else," she said. "California leads things, and the rest of the country follows."
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The state conjures an image of the "Outer Limit and Farthest Edge, where land ends and dreams are put to some final test," according to "The Literature of California," a 2000 anthology edited by UC Davis professor Jack Hicks and others.
From its start in Native American myths, California literature has portrayed the land's benign beauty and the familiar unease about its dangers.
"This earth is going to shift," the trickster Coyote says in a creation tale of the Maidu Indians of Northern California. "Since it is flat and thin, it will be an unstable world. After the world has all been created, then, by and by, I shall tug on this rope from time to time, making the earth shift."
California literature also is the story of newcomers to this uncertain landscape — the Spanish explorer, the Gold Rush miner, the Dust Bowl migrant, the Haight-Ashbury hippie, the Central American refugee.
But for English professor Beverly Hogue, the allure of California as a place of dreams and dashed hopes is powerful.
So last spring, Hogue led a class of literature students across the country on a weeklong trip to scour the Chinatown alleys of Maxine Hong Kingston, the poetry shelves at City Lights Bookstore and the misty hills of John Steinbeck's Salinas.
"The popular culture's image of California is a place where anything can happen," Hogue said. "We still see it as a place of possibility."
The pilgrimage was born from a surge of interest in California literature on college campuses across the nation.
Boosted by a new generation of students eager to explore the state's confluence of luxury and despair, of exploration and reinvention, courses in California Lit have popped up in schools such as Bowling Green University in Ohio and Carleton College in Minnesota as well as UC, Cal State and private campuses in California.
The courses often focus on the tension between California as a fantasized place of new beginnings and the harsh disappointments that follow. They explore how fictional works unfold against a natural backdrop that combines beguiling beauty and the ever-present threat of earthquakes and fires.
Those contradictions offer a bounty of possibilities for courses with names such as "California Stories" (UC Berkeley), "Visions of California" (Carleton), "California Dreaming" (Marietta), "Literature of California" (USC), "Mythmaking and Los Angeles" (Mount St. Mary's College) and "Global California: Crisis and Creativity" (UC Santa Barbara).
Rosemary Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Assn., an organization of professors of literature and foreign languages, said California Lit courses seem to be proliferating, an observation echoed by professors who said such classes were a rarity a decade or so ago.
The publication of several anthologies of California and Los Angeles literature has made it easier for instructors to assign a variety of works in a single semester, whether Mark Twain's whimsical Gold Rush memoirs or Walter Mosley's gritty L.A. detective novels.
The courses resonate with students who, even if they have never set foot in the state, have been immersed in images of California from movies, television and music.
"A lot of students have never been to California, but everybody dreams of California," said Nancy Cook, an English professor at the University of Montana and co-president of the Western Literature Assn. "It's just such a rich fantasy space. And it's also interesting to teach."
Student Laura A. Moseley, who is taking a class on California authors at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, said it has to do with learning about what's ahead.
"What happens in California eventually gets to everywhere else," she said. "California leads things, and the rest of the country follows."
::
The state conjures an image of the "Outer Limit and Farthest Edge, where land ends and dreams are put to some final test," according to "The Literature of California," a 2000 anthology edited by UC Davis professor Jack Hicks and others.
From its start in Native American myths, California literature has portrayed the land's benign beauty and the familiar unease about its dangers.
"This earth is going to shift," the trickster Coyote says in a creation tale of the Maidu Indians of Northern California. "Since it is flat and thin, it will be an unstable world. After the world has all been created, then, by and by, I shall tug on this rope from time to time, making the earth shift."
California literature also is the story of newcomers to this uncertain landscape — the Spanish explorer, the Gold Rush miner, the Dust Bowl migrant, the Haight-Ashbury hippie, the Central American refugee.
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