Dear colleagues,
I'm very pleased to announce the publication of my new book.
With best wishes,
Ricarda Vidal

Now available from Peter Lang Oxford:

Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms
by Ricarda Vidal

Peter Lang Oxford, 2013. £25.00
251 pp., 35 illustrations
ISBN 978-1-906165-42-0 hb.

http://peterlangoxford.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/now-available-death-and-desire-in-car-crash-culture/

http://www.peterlang.com?16542

Why are we so obsessed with cars?

Shiny objects of desire, cars never cease to fascinate us. As symbols  
of freedom they return again and again in art and film, even if real  
freedom is sometimes only achieved in the final explosive crash ? the  
climax of the sheer exhilaration of speed.

  ?Car crash culture? is a symptom of the twentieth century, Ricarda  
Vidal argues in this book, revealing that our love of the car and  
technology is caused by the continuing influence of  
turn-of-the-century ideas: the Futurist technological utopia and the  
Romantic return to nature and desire. Artists, writers and filmmakers  
have explored this troubled love affair with the automobile throughout  
the past century. The work of F. T. Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Jack  
Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Jean-Luc Godard (Week End), Richard Sarafian  
(Vanishing Point), J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg (Crash), Quentin  
Tarantino (Death Proof) and Sarah Lucas, among others, are shown to  
pursue these ideals, even as developments in modern cities and  
telecommunications continue to change the nature of speed and  
technology.

While the first half of the twentieth century was concerned with the  
celebration of speed and acceleration, the car crash has now become an  
obsession of contemporary culture. Vidal concludes that our attraction  
to the car crash reflects the contemporary way of life in the West,  
which is defined by a Futurist technophilia, a Romantic longing for a  
higher meaning and an undeniable infatuation with the automobile.

?This book is full of rich and unexpected readings of works that deal  
with our deepest fears and excitements in the twentieth-century duel  
between humanism and technology. Eschewing any easy moralism, alive to  
speed as both ?the only divinity? today and its potential horror,  
Vidal?s book is a clear-eyed reading of high points of a new, more  
grim romanticism, in which the crash is the spectacle of finitude.   
Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture is a brilliant reading of  the  
convergence of desire and technology in some of the most challenging  
works of modern culture.?

?        ­Enda Duffy, Professor of English at the University of  
California, Santa Barbara, author of The Speed Handbook: Velocity,  
Pleasure, Modernism


Ricarda Vidal is a lecturer, curator and translator. She holds a PhD  
in Cultural Studies (London Consortium / Birkbeck, University of  
London) and teaches at King?s College London and Middlesex University.  
She has published on urban space, cinematic architecture, the legacy  
of Modernism and Romanticism, speed, the car and driving as cultural  
phenomena, and society?s fascination with death and murder. Recent  
curatorial work includes a video booth at the London Art Fair 2011, a  
show on death and art at the Senate House, University of London and a  
curatorial residency at the Folkestone Triennial Fringe 2011.


NOW AVAILABLE from all booksellers and by direct order:

In the UK: Marston Book Services: [log in to unmask]

Worldwide: Peter Lang: http://www.peterlang.com?16542

For more information, please contact [log in to unmask]

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