Abstract

This paper explores an alternative method of textual studies (mobility textual studies) by examining the case studies on visual or literary texts from the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, which appeared in Mobilities and Humanities (2018) edited by Peter Merriman and Lynne Pearce. Contrary to its title of “humanities”, Mobilities and Humanities consists of the essays dealing with visual or literary texts and their aesthetics. This paper categorizes them according to whether or not an essay focuses on automobility. Because the automobility system has a major social and cultural significance as a machine regarding our contemporary mobilities. First, the essays deal with the aspects of the co-evolution of the automobility system and visual and literary texts. Their arguments can be summarized as follows: an intimate interaction of the automobility system and the road movie genre, a mediated automobility as a kind of text, travel novel and the textual representation of “paralyzed mobility”, and a peculiarity of individual car journey and “technological unconsciousness”. Second, other papers deal with the issues of mobilities of form or representation of mobility by focusing on the relation of mobility and artistic form, which can be summarized as follows: “mobilities of form” or “mobile artistic form”, the formation of “slow feeling into place” (a sense of attachment and familiarity) in a mobile world through realistic representation, the possibilities of the (re-)reading of fictional narrative and the alternative politics based on the “retrospective character” of literary texts, an experience of urban mobilities by the individual traveler appeared in their life writings (diaries). The significance of Mobilities and Humanities could be said in two points: first, this book allows literary researchers to pay attention to automobility which has not been fully examined so far; second, it can inspire fresh discourse about the textual aesthetics from the perspective of a new mobilities paradigm.