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Go West Young Woman: Joan Didion and Eve Babitz's Reinvention of California
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Lemire, Elise V.
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Spring 2025
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2025
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9203_Caiden_Oestreicher.pdf
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My senior project is a one-year independent study of, in my case, two American female writers of the 1960s and 1970s. Joan Didion is very well known and much studied and Eve Babitz is not. In pairing them, I hope to bring Eve Babitz out of the shadows. She also writes about Southern California, which was becoming, with their help, characterized by celebrity culture, the Sexual Revolution, recreational drugs, and violence. My objective is to uncover the role these two women writers played in popularizing while also critiquing this new, anxiety-producing version of California. Using Didion's The White Album, Play It as It Lays, Babitz's Sex and Rage, Slow Days Fast Company, and L.A. Woman, I analyze how both authors merge observational and reportorial writing with personal narratives that create a very specific kind of interiority through which the reader can experience California as a very particular state of being. Both authors utilize colloquial language and create streams of consciousness in order to bring the reader closer to their texts and their narrators' states of mind. I show that Didion takes a cynical approach whereas Babitz utilizes casual language to invent and explore a new cultural moment. Specifically, I am interested in how Babitz uses several strategic means to show what was becoming a decidedly Didionesque underbelly of American society.
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