TESC Curriculum Resources

AMERICAN WEST
Workshop on Davis's City of Quartz
by Brian Price

            Today we want you to examine Mike Davis's City of Quartz, Chapters 1 and 2, in some detail, paying attention to what the author says and to the relationships between ideas in the two chapters. The basic question is whether or not there is any relationship between the images of Los Angeles Davis reports in Chapter 1 and the realities of the changing structures of power he details in Chapter 2. To get at this question we want you to make two historical outlines, one for each chapter. Work in groups of six, taking 30 minutes for each of the three parts of the exercise.

        Part 1: For Chapter 1, look at how Davis has organized his writing (that is, pay attention to structural cues internal to the chapter). Identify each group of image-creators, locate them in time, and state what its concern, vision, or criticism about L.A. is. On your historical outline, report on the historically earliest group at the top of the page, and then work down.

        Part 2: For Chapter 2, pay attention again to how the chapter is organized. Make an historical outline concerning power groups in L.A. For each group, identify its time period, who has power, where in L.A. the group is located, what its power is based on, and what it tries to do with its power.
        Part 3: Having created your two outlines, place them next to each other and look for relationships between the two. What connections do you see between these two patterns of development?
   
        Next, return to L3500 and tape your two historical outlines to the walls for people to read. We will then have an all-group discussion of your analysis.

This copyrighted document may be freely reproduced and modified by faculty members at The Evergreen State College for classroom use at the college. Any other use or distribution of it without explicit permission from its author is prohibited. (It was created in AOLPress, a free graphic HTML editor, which is available for Macs and Windows machines at http://www.aolpress.com/download.html.)