366 pages
6 photographs, 4 illustrations
Bicycles have more cultural identities than many realize, functioning not only as literal vehicles in a text but also as “vehicles” for that text’s themes, ideas, and critiques. In the late nineteenth century the bicycle was seen as a way for the wealthy urban elite to reconnect with nature and for women to gain a measure of personal freedom, while during World War II it became a utilitarian tool of the French Resistance and in 1970s China stood for wealth and modernization. Lately it has functioned variously as the favored ideological steed of environmentalists, a means of community bonding and aesthetic self-expression in hip hop, and the ride of choice for bike messenger–idolizing urban hipsters. Culture on Two Wheels analyzes the shifting cultural significance of the bicycle by examining its appearances in literary, musical, and cinematic works spanning three continents and more than 125 years of history.
Bringing together essays by a variety of cyclists and scholars with myriad angles of approach, this collection highlights the bicycle’s flexibility as a signifier and analyzes the appearance of bicycles in canonical and well-known texts such as Samuel Beckett’s modernist novel Molloy, the Oscar-winning film Breaking Away, and various Stephen King novels and stories, as well as in lesser-known but equally significant texts, such as the celebrated Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Sacrifice and Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s nineteenth-century travelogue A Canterbury Pilgrimage, the latter of which traces the route of Chaucer’s pilgrims via bicycle.
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Zack Furness
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Bicycle as Rolling Signifier
Jeremy Withers and Daniel P. Shea
Part 1. Bikes in Literature
1. Pilgrims on Wheels: The Pennells, F. W. Bockett, and Literary Cycle Travels
Dave Buchanan
2. From Charles Pratt to Mark Twain to Frank Norris: Horse versus Bicycle, Man versus Machine
Peter Kratzke
3. "The Face of the Bicyclist": Women’s Cycling and the Altered Body in The Type-Writer Girl
Alyssa Straight
4. Bicycles and Warfare: The Effects of Excessive Mobility in H. G. Wells’s The War in the Air
Jeremy Withers
5. Like a Furnace: Alfred Jarry’s The Supermale, Doping, and the Limits of Positivism
Corry Cropper
6. Albertine the Cyclist: A Queer Feminist Bicycle Ride through Proust’sIn Search of Lost Time
Una Brogan
7. The Existential Cyclist: Bicycles and Personal Responsibility in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others
Nanci J. Adler
8. Communing with Machines: The Bicycle as a Figure of Symbolic Transgression in the Posthumanist Novels of Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien
Amanda Duncan
9. "Hi-Yo, Silver": The Bicycle in the Fiction of Stephen King
Don Tresca
Part 2. Bikes in Film
10. "I’ll Get You, My Pretty!": Bicycle Horror and the Abject Cyclicity of History
Matthew Pangborn
11. Bicycles in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim: Images of Emancipation and Repression
Charles L. P. Silet
12. We Hope, and We Lose Hope: The Postman’s Bicycle in Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice
Benjamin van Loon
13. Bicycle Borrowers after Neorealism: Global Nou-velo Cinema
Anne Ciecko
14. Breaking Away and Vital Materialism: Embodying Dreams of Social Mobility via the Bicycle Assemblage
Ryan Hediger
15. Beijing Bicycle: Desire, Identity, and the Wheels
Jinhua Li
16. "Swerve! I’m on My Bike": Mediated Images of Bicycling in Youth-Produced Hip-Hop
Melody Lynn Hoffmann
Afterword: Form and History in the Bicycle Sculptures of Ai Weiwei
Daniel P. Shea
Contributors
Index
