A Dark California

Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice is a Conex-Marie Curie Research Fellow at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. She has published essays on California literature, Post-colonial theory and opera studies. Agata Zarzycka is an assistant professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland. She has published essays on speculative fiction, transmediality and video games.

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments

Introduction (Katarzyna ­Nowak-McNeice and Agata Zarzycka)

Part I: California Under Construction

The Center Is Not Holding: Joan Didion and the California

Dreamer (Kathleen M. Vandenberg and Christopher K. Coffman)

Desert Women: Constructions of Female Identity and Motherhood in Angela Carter and Claire Vaye Watkins’s Feminist Dystopias (Donna Mitchell)

Playing Good Cop … or Bad Cop? Exploring Hyperreal Urban Spaces in L.A. Noire (Michael Fuchs)

“Feed the hole”: Alienation, ­Neo-Marxism and the Real in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (Elizabeth Lowry)

Tension of Exclusion: On Death Grips and the Californian Ideology

(Benjamin Halligan)

Part II: Californian Monsters

“Wolf howls and the roar of police sirens”: Fractured Identities, Lycanthropy and the Streets of Los Angeles in Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth (Carys Crossen)

Stuck Here Forever: Los Angeles as Purgatory in American Horror Story (Rose Butler)

Dreams Require Sacrifice: Fame, Fortune and ­Body-Horror

in Starry Eyes (Craig Ian Mann and Liam Hathaway)

Anywhere-Nowhere, California: The Real, the Imaginary and the Lonely Vampire in the Golden State (Simon Bacon)

True California: Vinci as Landscape of Terror (Marcin Cichocki)

Part III: Welcome to Dystopia

Thomas Pynchon’s Hybrid California(s): In Search of Spatial/Social Justice in Inherent Vice (Diana Benea)

“Come to California”: The Star as a Tragic Figure of American Apocalypse in Lana Del Rey’s Honeymoon (2015) (Steve Drum)

Cop Shows, Sitcoms and Oral Histories in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (Tomas Pollard )

These Kind of Dreams: Dystopian Depictions of California in the Music Video “Californication” (Daniel Klug)

Conclusion: Californias Everywhere (Katarzyna ­Nowak-McNeice and Agata Zarzycka)

About the Contributors

Index