Guest Lecture: Timo Müller (University of Konstanz) | The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility | May 18 2023

The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility

Timo Müller (University of Konstanz)

This online guest lecture is co-hosted by the Societal Change Forum and the Chair of North American Literature and Future Studies at TU Dresden.

Date and Time:
Wednesday, May 18, 6:30pm CET, online

Zoom Link:
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Abstract:
Public and academic debates around automobility have highlighted the need to rethink automobility. These debates usually revolve around technical innovations, such as replacing combustion engines and optimizing traffic systems. For these innovations to become solutions, however, the way individuals and societies think about automobility arguably needs to change on a more fundamental level. In particular, the environmental embeddedness of automobility, which has long been regarded as a disturbing factor, needs to be recognized as a primary and integral condition. The research project presented in this lecture contributes to this challenge by examining a period when automobility was a thoroughly environmental experience. In the early twentieth century, before closed cars and concrete roads became the standard, motorists navigated through mud, sand, and water, constantly exposed to the elements and acutely aware of their surroundings. Automobility was not sustainable at that time either, but it was perceived, discussed, and imagined as embedded in the natural environment. The project recovers this environmental approach to automobility by reading road literature from the period and tracing its environmental aesthetics: the new sensual perceptions and strategies of representation that automobility engendered.

Timo Müller is Professor of American Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His research focuses on modernist and African American literature, and on the environmental humanities. In 2022 he won an ERC Consolidator Grant to conduct a multi-year research project on “The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility.” His work has appeared in journals such as American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He has edited several textbooks and written two monographs, The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction (2010) and The African American Sonnet: A Literary History (2018), which is now available in paperback from the University of Mississippi Press.