Egg-headed car lovers are lumped together with scholars of modernism, historians of technology, and “materialist critics” as the audience for The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism, by Enda Duffy. We’ll see if this book crosses over from an academic readership to say, readers of Car and Driver Magazine. Duffy illuminates speed as a logic for and genuine pleasure of modernity. That would be pedal-to-the-metal all the way. He draws on what he calls “adrenaline aesthetics” in such works as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ballard’s Crash, and even the cautionary consumerism of Ralph Nader. He doesn’t stop there. As a cutting edge social theorist and professor of English at UC - Santa Barbara, Duffy takes news stories, photography (think of the old-fashioned racecar images of Lartigue, and the classic Robert Frank picture of a couple speeding along in a convertible), advertising, movies, and safety media to provide a breakneck tour of speed and how it continues to define American culture.
Duffy looks at the marketing of cars and how their mass-production enabled masses of people to experience speed, and by extension know modernity: -- to feel modernity in their very bones. Speed became the chief thrill of leisure. Duke did a recent book called Mobility without Mayhem, by Jeremy Packer, and that book looked at America’s fear and fascination with driving in general, a cool cultural history of a phenomenon. Duffy’s book is different and equally valuable in that it takes on speed all by itself, and eloquently explains its political as well as cultural connotations. Speed explains who we are, where we are going (getting there fast), and the whys and wherefores of the sometimes reckless impulse to get a move on.
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