Table of Contents

Contents: Three Hundred Electric Moons: The Futurists' Defiance of Death and Romantic Nature - Systematic Chaos: Fordism as a Practical Realization of Futurism - Life (and Death) on the Road: The Beat Generation and the Road Movie - The Infinite Repetition of the Accidentdentdent: Andy Warhol and Antun Maracic - Caspar David Friedrich through a Broken Windscreen: Arnold Odermatt's Peaceful Crash Scenes - In Praise of Slow Motion: Julio Cortazar, Carol Dunlop and Jean-Luc Godard on the Motorway of the South - Crash-Desire: The Post-Erotic Machine Men of J. G. Ballard's and David Cronenberg's Crash - Sheer Driving Pleasure: Sarah Lucas's Human Cars and the Death of the Car as Machine - Women Take the Wheel: Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.

About the Author

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 London and a curatorial residency at the Folkestone Triennial Fringe 2011.

Reviews

"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')