Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This article proposes that the motel, with its conjunction of mobility and temporary arrest, is activated in the domestic present by the aftereffects of violent national or local occupation. Often described in terms of a temporary and secondary homeliness, the motel might also be entertained as an imagining of everyday life without routine, without closure: the possibilities of mobility disconnected from linear progress and allied instead to chance and desire. The motel is envisioned as an architectural remnant of an often violent longing for distance and freedom that colors colonial and domestic enterprises. Acknowledging Benjamin’s desire for a “heightened graphicness,” this article attempts to read the motel as an interference device, a transgressive architecture that complicates linear accounts of progress, family, and history. The motel as interference device is fabricated in an “image” drawn from various constructions of motel; from Nabokov’s Lolita, Edward Hopper’s Western Motel, Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Motel, and Meaghan Morris’s At Henry Parkes Motel.

Keywords

motel architecture interiority graphic image Edward Hopper Walter Benjamin Laurie Anderson

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Anderson, L. (with Huang, H. C. ). (1995). Puppet motel [CD-ROM]. New York: Voyager.

Belasco, W. J. (1979). Americans on the road: From autocamp to motel, 1910-1945. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Benjamin, W. (1999). The arcades project (H. Eilund & K. McLaughlin, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

Computer Life. (1995, May). Retrieved April 27, 2003, from http://voyager.learntech.com/cdrom/catalogpage.cgi?puppet

Cousins, M. (1992-1993). The first house. Arch-Text, 1, 35-38.

Foucault, M. (1997). Of other spaces: Utopias and heterotopias. In N. Leach (Ed.), Rethinking architecture: A reader in cultural theory (pp. 350-356). London: Routledge.

Howell, J. (1992). Laurie Anderson. New York: Thunder’s Mouth.

Ports of entry: William Burroughs and the arts. (1996). Retrieved from http://www.spress.de/author/burroughs/visart/default/page.htm

Jakle, J. A. , Sculle, K. A. , & Rogers, J. S. (1996). The motel in America. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

10.

Morris, M. (1993). At Henry Parkes Motel. In J. Frow & M. Morris (Eds.), Australian cultural studies: A reader (pp. 241-275). St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin.

11.

Nabokov, V. (2000). The annotated Lolita (A. Appel, Ed.). London: Penguin. (Original work published 1955)

12.

Nägele, R. (2002). Thinking images. In G. Richter (Ed.), Benjamin’s ghosts: Interventions in contemporary literary and cultural theory (pp. 23-40). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

13.

New Zealand Press Association . (2003, June 24). Troubled boys put up in motel. The Press, p. A7.

14.

Richter, G. (2002). Introduction: Benjamin’s ghosts. In G. Richter (Ed.), Benjamin’s ghosts: Interventions in contemporary literary and cultural theory (pp. 1-19). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

15.

Shonfield, K. (2000). Walls have feelings: Architecture, film and the city. London: Routledge.

16.

Stewart, K. (1996). A space on the side of the road: Cultural poetics in an “other” America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

The Motel

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References