Periodic Reporting for period 1 - OffRoad (Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility)
Período documentado: 2023-01-01 hasta 2025-06-30
In times of climate crisis, there is wide agreement that we need a more environmental approach to automobility. “Off the Road” addresses this challenge by highlighting a largely forgotten fact: that automobility was a thoroughly environmental experience before the current system of closed cars on concrete roads emerged. This environmental automobility was particularly widespread in the United States, where much driving occurred in off-road conditions well into the 1920s. Motorists navigated through mud, sand, and water, constantly exposed to the elements and acutely aware of their surroundings. Early automobility thus engendered unprecedented modes of relating to the environment—modes that have never been systematically researched.
“Off the Road” recovers this environmental automobility by conceiving it as an aesthetic experience: one that created new sensual perceptions, new strategies of representation, and new formations of environmental knowledge. These aesthetic patterns found their most complex manifestation in road literature. The project assembles researchers from literary studies, environmental history, and the history of knowledge to recover the aesthetics of environmental automobility in three steps. (1) It builds an interactive digital corpus of American road literature from 1890 to 1929 to identify the full range of aesthetic strategies employed to render the experience of environmental automobility. (2) It positions these strategies within the modernist aesthetic innovations of the period, thus bringing into view a previously marginalized modernism inspired by slow driving in rural environments. (3) It examines how the aesthetics of automobility generated a new kind of mobile environmental knowledge that shaped environmental activism and the emergent science of ecology. In sum, the project reveals how early automobility created distinct modes of environmental awareness that can help us reconceive mobility today.
“Off the Road” recovers this environmental automobility by conceiving it as an aesthetic experience: one that created new sensual perceptions, new strategies of representation, and new formations of environmental knowledge. These aesthetic patterns found their most complex manifestation in road literature. The project assembles researchers from literary studies, environmental history, and the history of knowledge to recover the aesthetics of environmental automobility in three steps. (1) It builds an interactive digital corpus of American road literature from 1890 to 1929 to identify the full range of aesthetic strategies employed to render the experience of environmental automobility. (2) It positions these strategies within the modernist aesthetic innovations of the period, thus bringing into view a previously marginalized modernism inspired by slow driving in rural environments. (3) It examines how the aesthetics of automobility generated a new kind of mobile environmental knowledge that shaped environmental activism and the emergent science of ecology. In sum, the project reveals how early automobility created distinct modes of environmental awareness that can help us reconceive mobility today.
The first step was to expand and systematize the corpus of early automobility literature that the PI had already begun to assemble before the start of the project. At this point, the project team has compiled a corpus of over 700 primary texts, including fictional narratives, nonfictional narratives and poems. The project has located more sources than expected, including entire areas that have never been systematically researched, such as automotive young adult literature and early dramatic plays about automobility. The database went live in 2024, the second year of the project, and can be accessed at www.offtheroad.org. The project team developed systematic annotation criteria to help identify environmental patterns of perception and representation in these texts. The database currently includes around 100 annotated texts. This work is ongoing so that the database is growing continuously.
Based on the database, team members have done systematic research into several particularly prominent patterns of perception and representation, such as pastoral aesthetics, the trope of the pioneer, and the negotiation of human-animal relations through the new phenomenon of roadkill. The researchers have also been able to open up new perspectives on literary modernism by showing that modernist experimental poetry was shaped by environmental automotive aesthetics to a greater degree than has heretofore been supposed.
Based on the database, team members have done systematic research into several particularly prominent patterns of perception and representation, such as pastoral aesthetics, the trope of the pioneer, and the negotiation of human-animal relations through the new phenomenon of roadkill. The researchers have also been able to open up new perspectives on literary modernism by showing that modernist experimental poetry was shaped by environmental automotive aesthetics to a greater degree than has heretofore been supposed.
The database has opened up to research a large number of texts from the early period of automobility that have not come into the purview of scholarly analysis so far. The project’s research into the environmental aesthetics of automobility points beyond the focus on technological and social issues that has dominated the study of automobility so far. As the project members are drawing on the database for systematic case studies, further results beyond the state of the art are coming into view and will be published successively over the next few years.