Eng. 216: Literature, Technology, Society--The Road

Spring 2014, T/Th 9-10:15am, RH 213

Dr. Joe Essid, Weinstein 408

Office Hours: 1-2pm, T/Th and by appointment

jessid@richmond.edu

Writing Consultant: Max Payeur maxwell.payeur@richmond.edu

About the class: We will look at a range of fiction and films that explore how writers and film-makers have reacted to roads and cars. Some

of the road-trips we will take are delightful, but many are darker journeys toward the unknown and/or away from trouble. A few are dead (and deadly) ends. 

Stop here unless you have access to a car, your own, a rental car, or a friend's ride. You will be required to go on the road (see the Road Trip link on the sidebar) during the semester. You might also be able to take an intercity bus, but this travel can be difficult and schedules are limited. Student athletes with active schedules probably should plan to take another FSLT this semester, as you will need a free weekend or Spring Break to complete the Road-Trip assignment.

Students will practice skills of close reading of single works and comparative reading of multiple works. Be warned: the exams are closed-book and in-class. The reading load is not excessive, but if you do not read all the works and see the films, you will fare very poorly because of regular quizzes that will start class discussion and test that you did your work. Keep up.

Some goals:

• Deepen your experience with literature and film beyond what occurs in FYS, by looking at issues outside the texts such as historical and technological events connected to the work we study 

• Learn thoughtful and nuanced ways to annotate and use your course texts

• Learn how to interpret film and text in a meaningful way, using some of the terminology and techniques common in literary and film study 

  • Discover connections between the arts and other sorts of American thinking by visionaries, planners, and social critics of cars and the highway

• Learn how to weave personal experience and your own photography or video into one of our projects.     

• Think on your own because. . . 

Some who may expect "the teacher" to give you his favorite interpretation of a work to memorize are going to be disappointed. I do not have "the answer" in my head for each work we read or see. Even the author who will work with us, James Howard Kunstler, has changed his thinking over time about some of these issues.

My own interpretations change over time, too! You will have to get accustomed to coming up with your own interpretations and finding evidence to support them. Some answers are better than others, because the works support those answers. Still, there's no single best way to read a text or film--only well supported interpretations (and poorly supported ones). That is the nature of literary and film study.

Some big questions:

• Why do people go "on the road"? And why is this mainly a male pursuit? 

• Is "the road" an effective real-life replacement for the vanished Western frontier or the unrealized "final frontier" of space? 

• How does the road become not the means to an end, but an end in itself? 

• In our own journeys, do we resemble any of the characters we encounter?

• Did America build the wrong sort of road? What are the costs of the path we took?

• Is "The Road" as a place of dreams dying? Have your phones and their allure replaced the open road?

Why this topic? For a long time, America has been a nation of drivers, and our relationship to our vehicles is unlike that of any other nation. We could trace our restless energy to "hit the road" back to our frontier past, but that only begins to explain our restless energy to drive and our willingness to spend hours in our cars; it may be that the end of the Western frontier spurred our desire to seek what was already beyond history's vanishing point.

In any case, enormous changes have occurred ever since Henry Ford began mass production of automobiles about 100 years ago. Today the car and its attendant technologies color every aspect of our lives. Just consider how many figures of speech come from the world of cars and driving. Even non-automotive technology gets "branded" by this phenomenon. An early term for the Internet was "Information Superhighway," a phrase popular for a while because it captured the sense of travel, commerce, speed, excitement.

Since the car and "the road" have altered our ways of thinking, it is worth considering how creative people have responded.