Street-Level Writing: Los Angeles in the Works of Charles Bukowski
Keywords:
Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski, place, urban imaginaryAbstract
Los Angeles is central to Charles Bukowski’s (1920-1994) life and work. This paper examines the evolution of the representation of the city in his writings. It does so by situating the author in the broader context of the literary representation of Los Angeles in order to illustrate his particular perspective on the city and its many sites: that of a marginalized insider writing at street-level. It then proposes to reconstitute the dual trajectory of the author and his works in relation to the city. Interpreting Bukowski’s urban imaginary proves challenging because places are poorly fleshed out through description. Yet when approached as a whole, his writings do possess a coherent spatiality. Acutely myopic at first, the representation of the city gradually becomes more complex sociologically and geographically. Incomplete and patchy, the image of the city and its contrasted social worlds progressively acquires texture and depth. The paper finally argues the geographical imaginary Bukowski developed through his experience in the city’s underbelly informed his interpretation of L.A.’s social reality as a whole, provided him with the language and themes to express it, and supplied his very own vantage point to make sense of it all.References
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