Having Arrived, Time to Move on
Coupland's Brentwood as an Experiment with Space and Time
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4140229 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Hamers (0000-0003-1422-7997, Maastricht University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 12 |
| Pages | 2109-2125 |
| Publication date | 2001-12-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environment and Planning A Economy and Space (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0308-518X • E-ISSN: 1472-3409 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1068/a33189 |
| OpenAlex | W1977403457 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 23 |
In "Brentwood Notebook" the Canadian author Douglas Coupland depicts Brentwood, an affluent community on the outskirts of Los Angeles, as a place that in many ways hardly deserves our attention, but that for some of its characteristics may nevertheless serve as a symbol of our hypermodern Western society at the close of the 20th century. Coupland's essay can be interpreted as a challenging experiment with time and space. His Brentwood has various faces and they are evoked in a text that relies on a number of creative and disciplinary traditions, including cultural philosophy, social and cultural geography, new journalism, and literature. His representation of Brentwood is not only based on his personal observations, but it is also informed by three powerful cultural myths, involving notions generally associated with utopia, dystopia, and the ideal of upper class suburban life. If we are to grasp the meaning of the "Brentwood Notebook" properly, we should focus on what the text reveals about this California community and especially on how it conveys the author's understanding of that place. A close reading suggests that the tension between presence and absence, between the visible and the hidden, as well as between progress, stasis, and decay characterizes Brentwood in particular
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Dystopia · Linguistics · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Utopia · Viewpoints · Visual arts · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Law · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Political and Economic history of UK and US
Bourgeois utopias
The Making of the American landscape
Unfairly structured cities
City of Quartz
Modernism and suburbia as material ideology
The Urban Experience
Crabgrass Frontier
Geographies of Exclusion
Ecology of Fear
Borderland
Trouble in Paradise
Hypersegregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas
Suburbanization and Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas
An Examination of Population‐growth‐managing Communities
Landscape Taste as a Symbol of Group Identity
Towards an Understanding of the Gender Division of Urban Space
The Hoover(R) in the Garden
Private Pleasure, Public Plight
Growth, Politics, and the Stratification of Places
| Highly cited | No |
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