Ian Davidson

Automobility, materiality and Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis

In this paper I argue that an examination of changing patterns of mobility and automobility in contemporary literature can demonstrate ways that literary forms both reflect and produce cultural and social change. Focusing more specifically on automobility in Don DeLillo’s 21st century novel Cosmopolis, I take into account the car as it functions symbolically in the discursive realm with its promises of freedom and liberation, and its part in discourses of power, wealth and the ecological. I also acknowledge the impact of its presence as a material object that operates within global systems of production and consumption and integrated systems of roads. I conclude that the car in DeLillo’s novel not only contains ideas of automobility from the past, but also points the way forward to one future where the relative immobility of the congested automobile is countered by the mobility of the networking functions it contains.

Mobilities of form

Abstract Mobilities scholarship has provided convincing accounts of the increase in the quantity and range of movement of people and things. Literary texts have responded to this increased mobility. Drawing on Rancière’s notion of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ and Badiou’s idea of literature as an ‘event’, this paper develops the idea of mobile forms that identify the literary text as an aesthetic object that is realised in moments and always on the point of disappearing.

Movement and mobility in Patrick Hamilton

This article uses ideas of mobility and movement to demonstrate the interconnections between geographical and social mobility, and between mobility and materialism, in the work of Patrick Hamilton. Drawing on ideas from mobility studies in human geography and sociology, it examines continuities between the past and the future, and the ways that a combination of mobility studies and literary studies can re-imagine modernities through the work of an author whose later work has received little critical attention. Using the dystopian novel Impromptu in Moribundia as a link between his earlier novels and the later and more explicitly Marxist work, it draws together themes of movement and mobility through Hamiltons portrayal of the automobile as a symbol of fascism and a destructive and careless capitalism.