Enda Duffy
The Speed Handbook
The Speed Handbook is first and foremost devoted to exploring the thrill you feel when you experience intense new speeds.
Of what, exactly does the thrill of speed consist? Can speed’s excitement be harnessed and redeployed to energize the ways we live?
I suggest that this is exactly what happened for the first time in the modernist era, when the speed of the newly invented automobile allowed people at last to feel modernity in their very bones.
The Speed Handbook argues that access to intense new speeds for masses of people, with the arrival of the automobile and its instant acceptance, is a crucial sign of a new level if intensity that was offered to people in modernity.
Speed revolutionized people’s sense of space and territory. It gave drivers a sense of how, through this new technology, they might live their lives more intensely. It introduced them to new levels of physical risk and the powers of technologized violence: the crash. It placed them, even in their leisure moments, ever more fully under the surveillance of the law.
The modernist era, which followed the invention of the mass-producible motor car after 1896, marked a new regime of personal thrill-reward, personal risk and personal responsibility, all centered on offering masses of people access to hitherto-incredible speeds.
Editor: Erind Pajo
The Speed Handbook
Enda Duffy The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism Duke University Press 320 pages, 9 1/4 x 6 inches ISBN 978 0822344421
Available here →May 24, 2010
20100524-duffy-enda-on-speed-handbook-velocity-pleasure-modernism-1-1
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Enda Duffy
Enda Duffy is the author of The Subaltern Ulysses, as well as The Speed Handbook, featured in his Rorotoko book interview. He received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Harvard, and taught at Reed College and Wesleyan University before coming to the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he is now Professor of English and co-director of COMMA, the Center on Modernism, Materialism and Aesthetics.
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Speed is modernity's one genuinely new pleasure, and modernist art responds to its thrill, not to alienation.
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