The motorcar and desire : a cultural and literary reconsideration of the motorcar in modernity

At the risk of plagiarising Marinetti’s explosive Manifeste du futurisme (1909), through a process of cultural archaeology, this series of papers seeks to retrieve the largely forgotten clatter, rumble, and roar of the internal combustion engine as it (quite literally) erupted onto the stage of the modern world.i In pursuit of this objective, the present paper poses some central questions: As the automobile made its initial impact, how was the collective dream that lay behind it projected into the popular texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did early manufacturers represent the automobile? What were the preoccupations of their marketing and advertising executives? How did the earliest incarnations of public relations people position the machine? How did the columnists and journalists of the era respond? And did mass media messages about the motorcar somehow manifest themselves in high culture — especially in modern fiction, and particularly in the fictions of E. M. Forster and F. Scott Fitzgerald? These questions are central to this paper — which also considers how it was that we came to lose sight of the automobile; how it was that we became deaf to such a raucous engine of change.