Title: American Automobility and the Emergence of Environmentalism

Speaker：Timo Müller（Professor at University of Konstanz, Germany）

Time：November 5, 2021，21:00 to 22:30

ZOOM：2573998249 (code：D##U55)

Organizer: School of Foreign Studies, Jilin University

Introduction to Speaker:

Timo Müller is Professor of American Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His research focuses on modernism, African American studies, and the environmental humanities. 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. He has held research fellowships at the British Library, Harvard, and Yale. His current research explores the interrelations between mobility, the environment, and modernist aesthetics.

Introduction to Lecture:

Before the emergence of closed cars and concrete roads, automobility was a thoroughly environmental experience—especially in the United States, where much driving occurred in off-road conditions well into the 1920s. Motorists navigated through mud, sand, and water, constantly exposed to the elements and acutely aware of their surroundings. Early automobility thus engendered unprecedented modes of relating to the environment—modes that have never been systematically researched, but that contributed to the emergence of environmental politics as we know them today. This talk positions road narratives as an important lens onto this process. Drawing on a range of American road narratives from the first decades of the twentieth century, it traces the aesthetic modes these narratives develop to come to terms with the new experience of automobility and its environmental dimensions.