AMSTUD 126Q: California Dreaming
General Education Requirements
Course Description
“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 community or landscape? When we think of California, whose stories are included, and whose are left out?
Meet the Instructor: Rachel Heise Bolten
"I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and received my PhD in English from Stanford, so I've been thinking about California my whole life: as home, as a landscape I love, and as an object of study. I love finding new ways to understand place, whether driving across the state or looking at albums and letters in archives. In my research, I write about how we look at disappearing things. I explore disaster and catastrophe, precarity and extinction—urgent to modern readers but also to nineteenth and early twentieth century Americans, who used tools at hand to describe the vanishing world around them, producing novels and pictures, scrapbooks and catalogues of birds, railroads, weather, and stars. My interests include the American West, visual culture, the history of science and technology, and environmental humanities. I also like writing for general audiences, and my work has appeared in the Paris Review online, Bookforum, and photograph magazine, among other places."
