1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910484719003321

Autore

Court Elsa

Titolo

The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography : 1955–1985 / / by Elsa Court

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2020

ISBN

3-030-36733-9

Edizione

[1st ed. 2020.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (203 pages)

Collana

Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture

Disciplina

809.93355

809.7

Soggetti

Literature, Modern - 20th century

America - Literatures

Literature - Philosophy

Motion pictures - History

Civilization - History

Twentieth-Century Literature

North American Literature

Literary Theory

Film and TV History

Cultural History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Chapter One: Introduction By the Way: The Roadside as Other Space -- Chapter Two: “Stationary Trivialities”: Life on the Margins in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) -- Chapter Three: “Roadside Eye”: Accidents and Epiphanies in Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958) -- Chapter Four: “We’re all in our private traps”: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and the Decline of the American Motel -- Chapter Five: Roadside Chronicles: Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) -- Chapter Six: Conclusion: America Revisited.

Sommario/riassunto

The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography: 1955–1985 traces the origin of a postmodern iconography of mobile consumption equating roadside America with an authentic experience



of the United States through the postwar road narrative, a narrative which, Elsa Court argues, has been shaped by and through white male émigré narratives of the American road, in both literature and visual culture. While stressing that these narratives are limited in their understanding of the processes of exclusion and unequal flux in experiences of modern automobility, the book works through four case studies in the American works of European-born authors Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Frank, Alfred Hitchcock, and Wim Wenders to unveil an early phenomenology of the postwar American highway, one that anticipates the works of late-twentieth-century spatial theorists Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Marc Augé and sketches a postmodern aesthetic of western mobility and consumption that has become synonymous with contemporary America.