The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Introduction: By the Way—The Roadside as Other Space

   • Elsa Court

   Pages 1-22

3. “Stationary Trivialities”: Life on the Margins in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955)

   • Elsa Court

   Pages 23-64

4. “Roadside Eye”: Accidents and Epiphanies in Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958)

   • Elsa Court

   Pages 65-103

5. “We’re All in Our Private Traps”: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and the Decline of the American Motel

   • Elsa Court

   Pages 105-142

6. Roadside Chronicles: Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984)

   • Elsa Court

   Pages 143-178

7. Conclusion: America Revisited

   • Elsa Court

   Pages 179-186

8. Back Matter

   Pages 187-193

   PDF

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 consumptionthat has become synonymous with contemporary America.

• emigre literature
• American road trip narrative
• American roadside
• On the Road
• Jack Kerouac
• Vladimir Nabokov
• Robert Frank
• Alfred Hitchcock
• American postwar culture
• mobility studies
• mobility literary studies
• marginality in literature
• travel writing
• travel history
• dislocation in literature

“The American Roadside takes the titanic leviathan of the American highway and, through careful unfurling of its ostensibly homogeneous network of routes, turnpikes, and rest stops, lays bare one of the most provocative and indeed recognizable American spaces.” (Will Carroll, Journal of American Studies, Vol. 55 (4), 2021)

“Written with brio – especially when the book veers off the highway of academic writing – The American Roadside offers new perspectives on well-known works.” (Douglas Field, TLS The Times Literary Supplement, the-tls.co.uk, January 8, 2021)

“Engaging and illuminating study. … Court opens up new inroads for looking at American literary and film history. … The achievement of this highly readable book is to send us back to these otherwise familiar artworks with refreshed, more inquisitive eyes.” (Neil Archer, Review 31, May, 2020)

“The book draws convincing parallels between important cultural shifts in postwar America—such as the rise of mass culture and the interstate highway system—and the literature, film, painting, and photography produced by émigré artists of the period. One especially vivid contribution to the field comes in the book’s attention to the ways that the images of the American roadside transmute as they are adapted between media.” 

—Sunny Stalter-Pace, Associate Professor of English, Auburn University, USA

 

“This important new book traces the emergence of the American roadside as an important cultural space in the post-war literature, fiction, and photography of notable European émigrés. Building on a broad range of debates in literary studies, mobility studies, and cultural theory, this book provides a major contribution to the study of mobility and place in the humanities”

—Peter Merriman, Professor in Human Geography, Aberystwyth University, Wales

“Elsa Court’s The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography: 1955-1985 is a welcome contribution to the study of American mobility in the postwar era from a transatlantic perspective. Its merits lie in its interdisciplinarity (it offers separate chapters on Nabokov, Frank, Hitchcock, and Wenders) and in its lucid engagement with European theorists of the late-twentieth century, which puts pressure on certain accepted notions of emptiness and non-placeless.” 

—Monica Manolescu, Associate Professor of English at the University of Strasbourg, France, and author of Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities (2018)

• Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

  Elsa Court

Elsa Court teaches American Literature at Queen Mary University of London, UK. She has previously taught courses on contemporary French culture at the University of Oxford and her work has appeared in Granta, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Financial Times, among others.

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