Good student

From go to whoa: nine hours and 2,300 words later I have finished what looks like the virtually complete draft of an essay on chapter 26 of L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy for my university course on Postmodernism.  It'll do.  It has to cos we're leaving for Perth on Wednesday.  I can't remember the last time I had a student essay ready to submit six days before the deadline.  I'll put it in the box on Monday.

Here's the start:

Chapter twenty-six of LA Confidential is a microcosm of James Ellroy’s thematic interests as a writer of period fiction whose sometimes shocking autobiographical details[1] have driven the author to reject and re-construct the 20^th Century genre of ‘hard boiled’ detective thriller as part of a personal, literary and social pursuit of sometimes appalling underlying truths (as he perceives them).

[He] is one of the most significant historical novelists writing today.  His novels … describe 1950s Los Angeles and 1960s America through the eyes of ‘bad men doing bad things in the name of authority’.  If he departs significantly from what academic historians would consider acceptable practice, it is because he has a different, though equally rigorous and committed, approach to his material.[2]

Chapter twenty-six fuses the known social history of 1950s Los Angeles with Ellroy’s darker, imagined, conspiratorial and close to paranoid version to expose hidden truths about the corruption, exploitation and male violence that Ellroy sees at the heart of 20^th Century America. 

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[1] Reinhard Jud (Director): James Ellroy Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction (Fischer Film GmBH, Vienna 1998) access at this location http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YPHNCDxQgk on 14/04/12.  (All subsequent references are to this edition.)

[2] Jonathan Walker: ‘James Ellroy as Historical Novelist’ in History Workshop Journal Issue 53, page 181  (All subsequent references are to this edition.)