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. Mariana
Jake 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.