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Defamiliarizing the Mundane Roadscape

University of Staffordshire

It is a popular and academic notion that routine driving along motorways signifies contemporary alienation through a kind of serial "non-space." The author counters these dystopian assumptions about the character of this everyday pursuit by exploring his own experience of driving along England’s M6 motorway, showing how roads are enmeshed within unpredictable, multiple flows of ideas, sensations, other spaces and times, narratives, and socialities. By critiquing notions that autospace is inherently linear and featureless, that driving is asocial and desensitizing, and that the quotidian is a realm of unthinking and automatic behavior, he shows how it is precisely in the realm of mundane space-time that both homely familiarities and imaginative connections can be fostered.

Key Words: motorway • driving • everyday • autoscape • sensation • text and narrative

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