The Car Crash and Modernist Literature
Dr. Sebastien Fanzun
I investigate the role of the car crash in Modernist literature of the early 20th century; arguing that rather than as an event of contingency (and/or as a negation of meaning), the literary automobile accident works as a site where the very production of meaning can – and must – be negotiated, including the production of the literary text in which the accident appears. I read Emily Dickinson, Stéphane Mallarmé, Robert Musil, Alfred Lichtenstein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Patricia Lockwood, and Julie Ducourneau; and I cite, among others, Tom Eyers, Gilles Deleuze, Mimi Sheller, Rebecca Comay, Claudia Lieb, and Viktor Shklovsky. As proper names crash into each other, concepts combust, and movements come to abrupt halts, the forms of literary texts – genre, punctuation, typography, line breaks – turn into tireless agents registering roadkill.