The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography:
1955-1985 traces the origin of a postmodern iconography of mobile
consumption equating roadside America with an authentic experience of
the United States through the postwar road narrative, a narrative which,
Elsa Court argues, has been shaped by and through white male émigré
narratives of the American road, in both literature and visual culture.
While stressing that these narratives are limited in their understanding
of the processes of exclusion and unequal flux in experiences of modern
automobility, the book works through four case studies in the American
works of European-born authors Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Frank, Alfred
Hitchcock, and Wim Wenders to unveil an early phenomenology of the
postwar American highway, one that anticipates the works of
late-twentieth-century spatial theorists Jean Baudrillard, Michel
Foucault, and Marc Augé and sketches a postmodern aesthetic of western
mobility and consumption that has become synonymous with contemporary
America.