Space and Identity: The Los Angeles Case
Space and Identity: The Los Angeles Case

Summary/Abstract: The article addresses aspects of space representations in the Angeleno fiction at the turn of the twentieth century with a focus on Los Angeles and Hollywood, which, at the time, were eager to accommodate people’s strangest and most adventurous ideas while transforming them into a so-called reality. The rise of the modern city coupled with the growth of the capitalist system impacted Los Angeles which became a profitable commodity, on the one hand, and a dream-factory, on the other. Interestingly, what was loved and cherished by the locals and the adventurous was fiercely criticized by the intellectuals and the educated, whether locals or foreigners. Hence, the touristic turn of Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona (1884) and the dire, apocalyptic description of the city in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939) and in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1941). How did the Angelenos manage to accommodate people’s dreams in a heterotopic space like Hollywood? How did Hollywood as a hyper-real space impact the construction of individual and group identity?

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