| This project explores representations of the road, and ideas of mobility, in various artistic mediums, specifically the novel, film, and music, across the twentieth century. My discussion begins with the novelist John Dos Passos, who uses narrative techniques that borrow from film and music to draw on a uniquely American, spatially defined, concept of individual freedom as he develops an ambivalent romanticization of vagrants who remain in constant motion in order to retain a sense of integrated self in the face of fragmentation. As opposed to road texts that romanticize vagabondage, Dos Passos sees the assertion of autonomy through mobility as a negative submission to fate that nevertheless is a necessary response to a modernity that "steamrolls" individualism. I label the characters that adhere to such an ontology "hobo-heroes" and seek, in my first two chapters, to link Dos Passos's ambivalent concepts of stasis and mobility to a common theme found throughout American culture---dating back at least to St. John de Crevecoeur---that should be considered central to any understanding of road narratives. Filtering this American conceptualization through contemporary sociology, such as the works of Georg Simmel and Zygmunt Bauman, and the philosophical writings of Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze, I develop a conversation between road texts that romantically seek a utopian destination and those that ambivalently use motion as a response to modernity. My third chapter identifies a "beat" ethos of mobility that works decidedly against the ontology of the hobo-hero. Specifically, I use examples from the novels of Jack Kerouac and John Updike, and the film Easy Rider. My fourth chapter contrasts such artists with Bob Dylan's performance literature that notably mirrors and expands upon Dos Passos's use of mobility, therein providing an alternative to postmodern fragmentation. My conclusion attempts to utilize this dichotomy between road texts to begin a broader discussion of contemporary uses of mobility---such as the novelist Paul Auster and the film Y tu mama tambien---in an effort to show how "American" culture and literature, like the road, is a fluid medium and is struggling to remain so in the twenty-first century. |
