TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schneider, Melanie
T1  - « [C]’est absurde d’être bloqué sur une autoroute » – Das Motiv des Staus in der zeitgenössischen romanischen Literatur
JF  - promptus - Würzburger Beiträge zur Romanistik
N2  - Due to an ever-increasing number of automobiles on the roads, automobility fails more and more to fulfil its promise of free individual mobility, leading to traffic density and congestions of unprecedented proportions. However, those conditions seem to possess an aesthetic potential which we seek to analyze in terms of literature. Therefore, we are going to look on three novels from Romance-language areas: Julio Cortázar’s short story La autopista del sur (1966), Carlo Lucarelli’s novel Autosole (1998) and Grégoire Gauchet’s novel Les robinsons de l’autoroute (2018). First, we will analyze the nature of deceleration/congestion by referring to human geographer Tim Cresswell’s concept of friction. Second, we will examine recurring motifs linked to the deceleration/congestion in all novels before taking a closer look at Gauchet’s novel where the friction not only applies to traffic but also to human relationships. The aim is to look at different literary representations of an everyday experience like traffic congestion and to see how literature deals with such an occurrence.
KW  - traffic congestion
KW  - friction
KW  - motorway
KW  - immobility
KW  - car culture
Y1  - 2022
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-329807
SN  - 2364-6705
VL  - 8
ER  -