This title may seem arrogant : “my” is pretentious and the idea of “road” was so pivotal for so many authors at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century that it sounds ridiculous, with such a bad English, to claim to work on this very concept. However, these few words embody all my expectations as an international student on the West Coast. When I really think about the reasons which led me to leave my country, my family and my friends for one year, two words always come back in my mind as a small song you cannot forget : discovery and literature.
I went to the United States (and in particular in California) because of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, because of Dorothea Lange’s moving photographs depicting her particular vision of America, because of Robert Frank’s The Americans. For these three major artists, the same thing is always recurring, as an haunting element, maybe not always conscious but constantly present : The Road. I love this idea of a perpetual motion, this founding principle of America : the motion, the exodus, the discovery of new frontiers. That is why I chose the word “road”. I want my stay here not to be a stay, but a perpetual journey across the West Coast; both a literary journey and a real journey. I would like to be able to find my own way during these ten months, either a dirt track or a real road.
But America has changed since the Great Depression. Things have evolved since Lennie's and George's time (Of Mice and Men). I do not want to discover only Kerouac’s or Steinbeck’s America, I want to discover nowadays America, its past, its perspectives. It would be an absurdity to write a blog rooted in the idea of spatial motion, of road, but anchored in the past. I want my blog to reflect one partial (mine) vision of the present, here, in America.
I hope I have been able to explain properly the meaning of my title. My words are clumsy, my style is naïve but my determination is intact : one year of journey across nowadays America.
