This dissertation tracks the intersections and entanglements of nature, race, and class in Los Angeles literature through 1930s-1940s literary noir (environmental noir) and more contemporary climate fiction or “cli-fi” (California cli-fi). The project’s consideration of dual genres and periods generates a prismatic effect to perceive environmental patterns embedded in L.A.’s literature, and, in this way, it becomes clear that issues of race and class are entwined with the city’s environmental concerns. Environmental noir extends noir’s foundations to other texts not traditionally classified as noir, and ecocritical readings of novels by Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Chester Himes reveal interconnections between the destruction of L.A.’s environment and the social rot at the heart of the noir novel. Environmental noir’s concepts of entangled environmental and social devolution link directly to cli-fi’s project: showing the (imagined) impacts of anthropogenic climate change. With California cli-fi, this dissertation expands on ‘traditional’ climate fiction to incorporate narratives emerging from other types of apocalyptic or catastrophic events. Thus, in addition to Octavia Butler’s Earthseed novels, this project considers “accidental cli-fi” texts that feature new California landscapes, ecosystems, climates, and human habitation as the result of nuclear war, earthquakes, and more fantastical ruinations of the region. Environmental noir and California cli-fi’s shared concerns demonstrate the complex interplay between environment, race, and class in the “darkness” of L.A.’s noir and cli-fi literature, often located in moments of environmental, racial, and moral conflict or collapse.</p
