American Road Literature

358 Pages·6.102 MB·English

by  Ronald Primeau

C r i t iCa l
in s i g h t s
American Road
Literature
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C r i t iCa l
in s i g h t s
American Road
Literature
Editor
Ronald Primeau
Central Michigan University
SALem PReSS
A Division of eBSCO Publishing
Ipswich, massachusetts
GREY HOUSE PUBLISHING
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Cover Photo: Radius Images
editor’s text © 2013 by Ronald Primeau
Copyright © 2013, by Salem Press, A Division of eBSCO Publishing, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any man-
ner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or me-
chanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
system, without written permission from the copyright owner. For permissions
requests, contact [email protected].
Critical Insights: American Road Literature, 2013, published by Grey House
Publishing, Inc., Amenia, NY, under exclusive license from eBSCO Publishing,
Inc.
∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard
for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
American road literature / editor, Ronald Primeau, Central michigan University.
pages cm. -- (Critical insights)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4298-3819-1 (hardcover)
1. Travel in literature. 2. American literature--History and criticism. 3. Travelers’
writings, American--History and criticism. I. Primeau, Ronald, editor of compi-
lation.
PS169.T74A54 2013
810.9’355--dc23
2012049038
ebook ISBN: 978-1-4298-3835-1
PrINTed IN THe UNITed STATeS of AmerIcA
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Contents
About This Volume, Ronald Primeau vii
On American Road Literature, Ronald Primeau 1
Critical Contexts
Critical meeting Places: major Approaches to the American
Road Narrative Genre, Ann Brigham 15
Real, Romantic, modern, and Natural: midwestern Hybridity
and the frank Booth Illustrations in Theodore dreiser’s
A Hoosier Holiday, Marilyn Judith Atlas 32
Baudrillard in the Heartland: The construction of the
midwest in American Road Literature, Barry Alford 47
American odysseus: mark Twain, Travel, and the
Journey Home, John Rohrkemper 60
Critical Readings
Paradoxes along the Beat Journey in Kerouac’s On the Road,
Dominic Ording 81
Sinclair Lewis’s Free Air and the “Voyage into democracy,”
Ann Brigham 101
means and ends of the Road in the Works of Wright morris,
Joseph J. Wydeven 122
cormac mccarthy’s Second Literary Trilogy: dreams of the
Fire and Our Fathers, Richmond Adams 138
Girls Gone Wild: American Women’s Road Narratives and
Literary Tradition, Deborah Paes de Barros 150
The dark Side of the road: American road Narratives in
the Popular Dark Fantastic, David Bain 170
Poetics of Place in roethke’s “North American Sequence,”
Christian Knoeller 190
“The cost of This distance”: robert fanning’s American Prophet
and the Failure to Communicate, Caroline Maun 212
Journeying down freedom road: The Underground railroad
and the Narrative of Travel, Maureen N. Eke 231
v
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“Surprised to find Itself in a Tree in the chicago Suburbs”:
Images of Home and Travel in the Nonfiction of mary morris,
Mary Beth Pringle 248
Shoreline Sansaras, Arvid F. Sponberg 265
Key to the Highway: The road in the Blues, Phil Patton 281
Travel Guidebooks, cultural Narratives, and the American
Road Quest, Steven K. Bailey 291
A moving Story: The recurrence of the Kiowa Tsoai Legend in
the Work of N. Scott momaday, Matthew Low 307
Resources
Additional Works on American Road Literature 329
Bibliography 331
About the editor 337
Contributors 339
Index 343
vi Critical Insights
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About This Volume
Ronald Primeau
This volume of original essays is the largest and most diverse collec-
tion to date on American road literature. eighteen contributions were
commissioned to provide a comprehensive overview of the genre’s
historical development, its main forms of expression, and the wide
range of values discovered, created, and shared in journeys along high-
ways through America’s heartland. Represented here is commentary
on Native American travel legends, the Underground Railroad, and
traditional writers in the American canon such as mark Twain, Theo-
dore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Jack Kerouac, alongside emerging
and more recent figures and the usually overlooked accounts of early
women writers. Poets such as Theodore roethke and robert fanning,
blues songs, and travel guides all contribute to the amazing range of
the literature of quest, discovery, and settlement that continues to de-
fine us as a diverse people on the move.
The first four essays survey major critical approaches applied to the
enjoyment and interpretation of the genre. They also apply critical and
cultural theory to some of the earliest road stories and to French phi-
losopher Jean Baudrillard’s views of how the heartland functions in the
symbol-making processes of our lives. A comparison of two works by
mark Twain suggests further ways in which we can read and contextu-
alize these books.
The critical readings section presents fourteen discussions of sig-
nificant road books, beginning with the paradoxes of gender in the
novel that has been considered the bible of American road literature:
On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac. The three essays that follow
address some lesser-known works and important themes taken on by
Sinclair Lewis, Wright morris, and Cormac mcCarthy. Deborah Paes
de Barros reviews the almost-buried history of women’s early travel
narratives and assesses their modifications of road-genre conventions
more recently. The next three selections turn to topics often missed
About This Volume vii
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along the highway, first with david Bain surveying the road’s ventures
into dark fantasy and horror fiction. christian Knoeller next consid-
ers how michigan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Theodore roethke’s
meditations on nature and mystical yearning inform his masterful
use of journey tropes in The Far Field (1964). In a companion piece,
Caroline maun shows us Robert Fanning’s creation of a counterpoint
dysphoria in American Prophet (2009) that comes up against road-
literature conventions that have lost their appeal and power. Fanning’s
prophet sets out with predictable optimism, comes up empty, and tries
to warn his listeners about what Braun calls the extremes and the ex-
cesses he experiences. Unable to communicate the warnings he tries
repeatedly to convey, his prophetic voice becomes parodic, underscor-
ing both the failure and the personal cost of the collapse of what had
for so long been reliably heroic and healing.
The final grouping of essays illustrates the cultural diversity of the
genre and returns to the rich values and insights that have been discov-
ered and nurtured along the highways through the heartland. maureen
eke explores the long tradition of Underground Railroad literature in
the clandestine and arduous work of moving toward freedom and the
achievement of civil rights. matthew Low provides similar insights on
the particular patterns of movement in m. Scott momaday’s rework-
ings of Kiowa Tsoai legends. Phil Patton listens closely to the lyrics
of blues songs and the cultural geography they map onto the highways
through the heartland—like the freedom road and road of escape High-
way 61, a home in motion to Bessie Smith, magic Slim, Bob Dylan,
robert Johnson, Ike Turner, and so many others.
Finally, these selections share examples of the ever-evolving genre in
action, as mary Beth Pringle underscores images of home and travel in
mary morris’s nonfiction and Arvid Sponberg composes a hybrid genre
rolling across roads that limn Lakes michigan, Huron, and Superior in a
creative-nonfiction exploration of teaching, writing, politics, marriage,
parenthood, and religion, combined with commentaries on heartland
writers Bonnie Jo Campbell, Chad Harbach, and Bruce Norris. Steven
viii Critical Insights
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K. Bailey scrutinizes a form of road literature often read but seldom
analyzed: travel guidebooks and road atlases. In these most practical
household packagings of discourse, he identifies genre conventions and
finds camouflaged ideologies and lines of power often so subtle as to be
nearly subliminal in their rhetorical and political agendas. Bailey argues
persuasively that readers need to first recognize and then challenge the
naturalized ideologies in order to open up space for counternarratives
with more nuanced insights about places, people, and cultures.
equipped with guidebooks they may adhere to or resist, today’s
drivers and readers along the highways through the heartland occupy
the same physical and mythical space traveled by Native Americans,
slaves escaping on the freedom trails, pioneer women combining set-
tlement and quest motifs, beat poets and other countercultural heroes,
blues singers and poets chronicling the untold stories of everyday peo-
ple, and even visiting French philosophers, joining the worries of John
Steinbeck and his French poodle, Charley, that we are trading genuine
experience for homogenization and simulations of the concocted and
the unreal.
In many new and diverse ways, the contributors in this volume ex-
amine the rich history of literary road travel and show how the genre
has moved in directions that open up spaces for new quest journeys,
identities, and places in hybrid literary forms. each essay in the vol-
ume traces how every new road trip unsettles and undermines our as-
sumptions about race, class, and sexual identity. Being in motion in-
vites new ways to look at the realities and values we have been taught.
From the buoyant leaps into the unknown to the darkest dystopias of
splatter-horror fiction, the journeys through America’s heartland rein-
force even as they subvert and parody the pilgrimage tradition. The
journey truly does become more important that the destination as the
road itself becomes home, rather than merely the place one sets off on
to get somewhere else.
Along rivers and railroad tracks, dirt roads, blue highways, and in-
terstates, on foot and on two, four, or more wheels, walkers, bicyclists,
About This Volume ix
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