In Mythologies Roland Barthes contends that automobiles have been "consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriated them as a purely magical object." The Driving Machine explores how this magical object has been appropriated into the myth of American literature by foregrounding and scrutinizing the presence of the automobile in the works of selected writers: principally, Lewis, Fitzgerald, Sinclair, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Faulkner, Kerouac, O'Connor, Updike, Bontemps, Ellison, Wright, Doctorow, Crews, and Joy Williams. / The automobile unites the American fundamentals of individualism and movement--auto-mobility--and the study first examines the literary groundwork for automobility prior to the invention of the car. Next, Lewis's works prove particularly instructive in tracing an evolution from the romantic appeal of the automobile during its early years to an increasing use of the vehicle to satirize conspicuous consumption. Writers began to scrutinize the view of car as liberator of the masses (a view championed by Ford) to expose the realities of mass production and assembly-line technology. / By the thirties, the car had become essential to most Americans, such as Steinbeck's Joads, and had transfigured the rural landscape, as evidenced in Caldwell and Faulkner. During this period the car attained increasingly complex signification, finding itself the center of an intricate relationship of attraction and repulsion. After World War II, the automobile assumed mythical prominence, as in Kerouac's On the Road; however, the social revolution of the sixties and seventies replaced this exalted image with an image of car as polluter and murderer. The oil crises of the 1970s dealt a final blow. Updike grasps these manifold changes in his Rabbit tetralogy. / At the close of the century, Americans view the car with ambiguity and complexity, contemplating the difficult choice of reconciliation or life without vehicles. Literary responses to automobility have never been so multifarious. Works such as Harry Crews's Car and Joy Williams's Escapes present the paradoxical role automobility assumes in our present lives. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-08, Section: A, page: 2923. / Major Professor: Fred L. Standley. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_76446 |
| Contributors | Casey, Roger Neal., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 293 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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