Related Papers
M/C Journal
Dream Machines: The Motorcar as Sign of Conquest and Destruction in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
2020 •
Paul Ryder
In my article, "A New Sound; a New Sensation: A Cultural and Literary Reconsideration of the Motorcar in Modernity" (Ryder), I propose that "a range of semiotic engines" may be mobilised "to argue that, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the motorcar is received as relatum profundis of freedom". In that 2019 article I further argue that, as Roland Barthes has indirectly proposed, the automobile fits into a "highway code" and into a broader "car system" in which its attributes—including its architectural details—are received as signs of liberation (Barthes Elements, 10, 29). While extending that argument, with near exclusive focus on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and with special reference to the hero’s Rolls Royce, I argue here that the automobile is offered as a sign of both conquest and destruction; as both dream machine and vehicle of nightmare. This is not to suggest that the motorcar was, prior to 192...
Motorcars and magic highways: The automobile and communication in twentieth-century american literature and film
2013 •
Jason Vredenburg
The Journal of American History
Review: 'Motoring West: Automobile Pioneers, 1900-1909
2016 •
John Heitmann
Technology and Culture, vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 466-467.
Book Review: Blanke, Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of America's Car Culture, 1900-1940
2008 •
Kevin Borg
Studies in Travel Writing
‘Tire trouble’: Mules and Men and automobiles
2013 •
Alasdair Pettinger
The Infernal Automobile: Car Culture in the Fiction of J.M.G. Le Clézio (by James Boucher)
IJHCS IJHCS
This paper proposes an analysis of the culture of the automobile in J.M.G Le Clézio’s early fiction. Tracing the emergence of the automobile as icon and myth during the trente glorieuses of post-war France, cinematic representations of the car in Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle anchor a discussion of the unintended consequences of the ubiquity of the personal vehicle in French urban spaces. Le Clézio’s texts create a complex image of the automobile as anathema to the natural environment, social cohesiveness, and individual identity. Rather than being represented as liberating, the idealized culture of the car is problematized as providing neither mobility nor freedom. Keywords: eco-criticism, capitalism, car culture, pollution, consumerism, space.
International journal of humanities and social sciences
The Infernal Automobile: Car Culture in the Fiction of J.M.G. Le Clézio
2016 •
James Boucher
This paper proposes an analysis of the culture of the automobile in J.M.G Le Clezio’s early fiction. Tracing the emergence of the automobile as icon and myth during the trente glorieuses of post-war France, cinematic representations of the car in Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle anchor a discussion of the unintended consequences of the ubiquity of the personal vehicle in French urban spaces. Le Clezio’s texts create a complex image of the automobile as anathema to the natural environment, social cohesiveness, and individual identity. Rather than being represented as liberating, the idealized culture of the car is problematized as providing neither mobility nor freedom.
"Sky Haunting: The British Motor-Car Industry and the World Wars." Virginia Woolf Writing the World: Selected Papers from the Twenty-Fourth Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Pamela L. Caughie and Diana Swanson. Clemson, S.C.: Clemson UP, 2015. 49-54.
Ann Martin
Journal of American Studies
Horsepower: Animals, Automobiles, and an Ethic of (Car) Care in Early US Road Narratives
2022 •
Daniel Bowman
From the mid-1890s to the present day, cars have been fetishized as animal in US automotive culture. This began with automotive periodical Horseless Age, which, in positing the car as a substitute for the horse, decried the material limitations of the "outdated" animal whilst at the same time seeking to co-opt its symbolic value. In the first US road trip novels of the 1910s automobiles are described figuratively as animals, simultaneously evoking the horse while symbolically killing it. Examining the intertwined material and symbolic relations between humans, animals, and machines at the dawn of the motor age elucidates the necropolitical position of animals in automotive culture - of the horse in horsepower.
CARBARISM: CIVILISING THE AUTOMOBILE
Cameron Gordon
Instead of a debate about whether the automobile is good or bad, this article will argue that it is more useful to carefully consider how the automobile should live in its natural environment in a way that is compatible with human development. We should, I will argue, now develop a framework to civilize the automobile. Civilization is probably harder to define in a positive sense than in a negative one; i.e. what goes against civilization is generally easier to agree upon that what advances it. Thus, I offer the concept of 'carbarism'. This is not meant to be a blanket epithet but a rubric for identifying social and economic applications of the automobile that could be said to be 'barbaric' in the sense of degrading human civilization, and hence to be avoided. Technology is never neutral with respect to society. Its contribution to civilization can just as easily be negative as positive. Any technology should to be introduced into the wild (so to speak) in a way that ensures that civilization is advanced along with technical progress. The automobile thus far has been simultaneously social advancer and destroyer but it is not too late to begin to civilize the automobile. Some of this involves undoing, slowly, design and institutional mistakes of the past. Some of this involves progressing technological advancement of automobility in a way different from that of the past. But whatever moves may be made the advance of civilization in a broad sense and the avoidance of barbaric uses of the car (carbarism) should be kept front and centre.
