Une sociopoétique des stations-service

Abstract

This article proposes a sociopoetic reading of gas stations based on a corpus of American and French cultural representations. An analysis of literary works (by Cormac McCarthy, Shirley Ann Grau and Alexandre Labruffe) and artworks (by Edward Hopper, Walker Evans and Ed Ruscha) reveals the complexity of these modern stopping points. What could be considered initially as a perfectly ordinary "non-place", the gas station emerges, as it turns out, as a space of vitality. It feeds our imagination. It is a place of different possibilities: temple of triumphant modernity, transit zone, theater, site of our fantasies of adventure and of our of the end-of-world catastrophes.