Browsing by Author "Burch, Paul W."

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    Bad Roads: Feral Transport Media in American Narrative Art, 1913-1977
    (2024-06-26) Burch, Paul W.; Wolfe, Cary; Comer, Krista
    In Bad Roads: Feral Transport Media in American Narrative Art, 1913-1977, I devise the biopolitical and critical regionalist framework of “the bad road” to read for moments of textual ferality in early-to-mid century American literature and film. This framework is based around an understanding of transport media—technologies of mobility, infrastructures, adjacent landscapes—as constructs that mediate and include through exclusion. In what follows, I read for the presence and function of transport media in a diverse array of narratives drawn from the pre and post-interstate eras of twentieth century America. Conducting these analyses demonstrates how both transport media, and the narratives that incorporate them, are uniquely prone to rupture and immunitary failure: moments when a protected inside becomes an outside, or an excised other makes an unheralded return. I refer to this dynamic of containment and rupture as the “bad road.” By applying the “bad road” framework to authors such as Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, and N. Scott Momaday, I unpack how the work of narrating mobility in an American colonial context is particularly fraught as the project of modernization is marked by an irrepressible plurality: cultural, geographic, interpersonal, temporal. By setting my project against the backdrop of a crystallizing culture of the “good road” as mobile privatization, I determine that how an author employs, avoids, or is subjected to, the permutations of the bad road, is intimately linked to their cultural positioning. Reading for these differences is crucial to considering the perils and possibilities of mobility in the United States—past, present, and future.