Road novel, road movie : approche chronotopique du récit de la route
Appearing in the wake of World War II, with the publication in 1957 of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, followed 12 years later with the screening of Denis Hopper’s Easy Rider, the road novel and road movie constitute, we argue, two sides of what we call the road narrative. Faced with a lack of comprehensive studies embracing both sides concurrently, and with recurrent amalgams, we reflect on the components differentiating the road novel and road movie from other types of wandering stories. Such a project calls for the construction of an intermedial apparatus, enabling us to jointly encompass artworks belonging to different media formats. Consequently, we build on the concept of the chronotope, as developed by Bakhtin as a tool for literary criticism, and recently extended by scholars to cinematographic objects. We show how road novels and road movies emerge from the combination of two fundamental chronotopes: that of the road, exemplified by a postmodern universe dominated by motor vehicles and non-places, and that of the threshold, understood as the expression of a critical turn in one’s life. The noted presence of a parodic dimension in road narratives calls for the introduction of an additional bakhtinian concept: the carnivalesque, which, as we show, can be articulated in relation to the previously defined road and threshold chronotopes. For this chronotopical analysis, we selected artworks from the American, Quebecois and German repertoires, a choice justified by the numerous potential connections to be established between those three different cultures.
Road movie Road novel Chronotope Road movie Road novel Road narrative Wandering Treshold Bakhtin Chronotope Carnivalesque