Dagoberto Gilb

Facts of Gilb

• Native of both Los Angeles and El Paso• Been a visiting writer at the Univeristy of Texas and the

University of Arizona• Awards accomplished; James D. Phelan Award in

literature and The Whiting Award; National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship

• Often his works reflect his experiences as a worker moving between Los Angeles and El Paso.

• 1994 published his 1st novel The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna

“Love in L.A.”“Love in L.A.”

Literary Terms

• Colloquial: refers to a type of informal diction that reflects casual, conversational language, and often includes slang expressions.

• Ex. pg. 257 The dialogue between Jake and Mariana is very similar to everyday speech.

* Jake also uses words like kinda and doin which is an example of everyday slang.

• Image: a word, phrase, or figure of speech that addresses the senses, suggesting mental pictures of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, or actions.

• Ex. pg. 256 In the opening paragraph Gilb uses many descriptive independent clauses that depicts the images of his dream car.

* …, a cruise control for those longer trips, mellow speakers front and rear of course, windows that hum close,

snuffing out that nasty exterior noise of freeways.

Setting and Plot

• Setting: the physical and social context in which the action of a story occurs. The setting is on a Hollywood Freeway.

• Plot: an author’s selection of incidents in a story to shape the action and give the story a particular focus. We are assuming that Jake is going to work but we are not really sure because of Jake’s deceiving nature.

Style and Tone

• Style: the distinctive and unique manner in which a writer arranges words to achieve particular affects. The style of this story is very descriptive and this story contains a lot of dialogue. The descriptions are very long and the dialogues are very short.

• Tone: the author’s implicit attitude toward the reader or the people, places, and events in a work as revealed by the elements of the author’s style. The tone of this story is calm at the beginning and then becomes persuasive.

Irony• Irony: the literary device that uses contradictory

statements or situations to reveal a reality different from what appears to be true. The irony in this story is dramatic irony.

• Dramatic irony creates a discrepancy between what a character says or thinks and what the reader knows to be true. Jake lies about his driver’s license, his tag, his address, and his insurance.

Theme• Theme: is a central idea or meaning of a story. It

provides a unifying point around which the plot, characters, setting, point of view, symbols, and other elements of a story are organized.

• Theme of Love in L.A.- The unexpected can always happen. (the accident that takes place on a crowded highway in the assumed morning commute to work) You can never trust individuals on an initial meeting. (Jake’s whole life was a lie, from whether or not he was truly going to work, from his tag, to the idea of him being an actor)

Characters

A character is a person presented in a dramatic or narrative work.

Jake vs. MarianaJake was very deceitful and his whole life was

centered around lies.Mariana was the symbol for purity and she seemed

to be very honest. She was also appeared to be very innocent because she still lived at home with her parents and she was not married.