Unfolding Crashes:: Literary Modernism, Form, and the Traffic Collision

Engaging with both the philological trend of New Formalism and the sociological field of mobility studies, the thesis investigates the car crash as a topos of Western Modernist literature. Literature, the argument runs, develops a transitive notion of 'unfolding crashes': by unfolding (themselves), crashes unfold their crumpled enmeshment: the various lines of causality enfolded within their form. If it is by their very form that literary crashes render readable the determinants of their morphology. Developing Tom Eyer's notion of a Speculative Formalism, the thesis studies Expressionist poetry, Robert Musil's Mann ohne Eigenschaften and William Faulkner's short story Elly with special attention to asemantic textual aspects - punctuation, dashes, proper names - as the site of literature's awkward connection to extratextuality: as these formal markers mark what informs the literary crash and thus exhibit its subjectness to various socio-morphological determinants, they contradict what could be summarized as the most important component of automobility's ideological framing of the car crash: its pure 'accidentality' understood as an event coming from without rather than produced within, and thus foreclosing any assignment of blame going beyond the individual event towards automobilism as a whole. The political power of the literary car crash is thus not to be conceived of as a commentary – wherein literary modernism only 'comments' on car crashes 'happening' in the real world. Rather, it resides in a formal unfolding of embededness, undermining the automobilist ideology of pure accidentality without even the need to mention it.