Driving that highway to consciousness: late twentieth-century American travel literature

Abstract

The American road narrative moved into new territory in the second half of the twentieth century. These recent literary expeditions reflect a variety of cultural and historic forces: changes in technology, economics, gender roles, migratory patterns, politics, and philosophies as well as the emergence of suburban culture all impact the American literary experience of travel. Two particular elements increasingly construct the American travel narrative: the emergent culture of the car and its resultant highways, and the Modernist (and Postmodernist) concern with the replication of consciousness. As concepts of identity changed, literary genres, including travel writing, had to change in response. The automobile, available early in the century and an omnipresent necessity after World War II, fostered an American love affair with speed, distance, and the solitary euphoria of piloting one's own vehicle across the miles. Freed from dependence upon the slower, communally directed engines of transportation - the trains, buses, boats, horses, carriages, and ox-pulled wagons - the road now offered a speedy, and indeed a glamorous escape from social conformity. As automobiles became increasingly common they engendered new social institutions. Motels, highways, freeways and interstates, diners and truck stops paved the way for the car trip. The auto became fetishized and romanticized; horsepower, size, and interior accoutrements emerged as subjects of poetry. Rather than a mere vehicle to move the passengers from one point to another, the car itself constituted experience and narrative possibility.