Who Gets to Go on the American Road? New Perspectives on the American Road: Jessica Bruder’s and Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive

• Autor(a) principal: Almeida, Catarina Moura Reis
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/158769
• topic: Estrada americana; Oeste americano; Narrativas femininas; Nomadland; Lost Children Archive; Estrada americana; Oeste americano; Narrativas femininas; Domínio/Área Científica::Humanidades::Línguas e Literaturas

The American road narrative genre is a quintessential genre in American literature as it deals with themes that are inseparable from the country’s formation and from the construction of American identity. Often set in the mythical landscapes of the American West, these narratives convey the promises of spatial and social mobility that characterize the American Dream and that are made possible by going on the road. Nevertheless, this possibility of mobility has been reserved to traditional road heroes — white, heteronormative men — and systemically excluded minorities from accessing the road in the same terms. Consequently, this had an impact on how American road narratives written and starred by minorities have been received and analyzed. This dissertation engages with narratives written and starred by women, namely Nomadland (2017/2020) and Lost Children Archive (2019), in order to understand how they position themselves in the matrix of the genre and how they adhere to or deconstruct the hegemonic discourses that shape it. The main conclusion is that women’s American road narratives are complex and paradoxical: sometimes they adhere to the traditional genre’s structures that have systemically excluded them, other times they subvert them. This means that, for the analysis of women’s narratives to be fruitful and complete, scholars should rethink the way the approach the genre, and avoid to the dichotomies and hegemonic discourses that have permeated it. This conclusion implies that narratives that intersect gender, class and ethnicity should be regarded as highly valuable as they offer refreshing perspectives for American road narratives in the 21st century.