Dubious American license: The first in flight

Semrau, Janusz

doi:10.2478/v10121-010-0013-6

Abstract

The symbols, colours and slogans on vehicle registration plates are part and parcel of the United States iconography. While not everybody relates readily to Ohio's license plate motto "Birthplace of Aviation", everybody seems to know North Carolina's motto "First in Flight". (Although the Wright brothers came from Ohio they chose North Carolina as the site for their 1903 groundbreaking experiment.) With the open horizon as the obligatory conceit of the U.S. landscape, North Carolina's license plate projects a homonymic mis-association with the dominant motif of American popular cultural discourse recognized emblematically by Leslie Fiedler (1960: 318) as the razzle-dazzle of escape.

References

Algren, Nelson 2001 Chicago: City on the make. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Search in Google Scholar
Anderson, Sherwood 1924 A story teller's story. New York: B. W. Huebsch.
Search in Google Scholar
Anderson, Sherwood 1960 Winesburg, Ohio. New York: The Viking Press.
Search in Google Scholar
Anderson, Jr., John D. 2004 Inventing flight. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Search in Google Scholar
[Anonymous] 1846 "A false alarm: A true story", Frazer's Magazine for Town and Country XXXIV: 232-234.
Search in Google Scholar
Auster, Paul. 2003 The book of illusions. New York: Picador.
Search in Google Scholar
Bayley, Sally 2010 Home on the horizon: America's search for space, from Emily Dickinson to Bob Dylan. Oxford: Peter Lang.
Search in Google Scholar
Beard, George M 1879 "Physical future of the American people", The Atlantic Monthly XLIII/260: 718-728.
Search in Google Scholar
Benét, Stephen Vincent 1943 Western star. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
Search in Google Scholar
Billington, Ray Allen. 1993 America's frontier heritage. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
Search in Google Scholar
Braxton, Joanne M. (ed.) 1999 Maya Angelou's I know why the caged bird sings: A casebook. New York: Oxford University Press.
Search in Google Scholar
Browne, Ray B. - Marshall W. Fishwick - Kevin O. Browne (eds.) 1990 Dominant symbols in popular culture. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Search in Google Scholar
Chopin, Kate 2002 Complete novels and stories. (Edited by Sandra M. Gilbert.) New York: The Library of America.
Search in Google Scholar
Chopin, Kate 2002a "Dead men's shoes", in: Kate Chopin 2002, 467-474.
Search in Google Scholar
Clough, Wilson O. 1964 The necessary earth: Nature and solitude in American literature. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.10.7560/733138
Search in Google Scholar
Cox, James M. 2002 Mark Twain: The fate of humor. (2^nd edition) Columbia - London: University of Missouri Press.
Search in Google Scholar
de Tocqueville, Alexis 1966 Democracy in America. (Edited by J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner, translated by George Lawrence.) New York: Harper & Row.
Search in Google Scholar
Doctorow, E. L. 1989 Welcome to Hard Times. New York: Fawcett Crest.
Search in Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. 1969 The complete poems and plays. London - Boston: Faber and Faber.
Search in Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. 1969a "Choruses from ‘The rock’", in T. S. Eliot 1969, 147-167.
Search in Google Scholar
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 1983 Essays and lectures. (Edited by Joel Porte.) New York: The Library of America.
Search in Google Scholar
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 1983a "Nature", in: Ralph Waldo Emerson 1983, 3-49.
Search in Google Scholar
Etulain, Richard W. (ed.) 1979 Jack London on the road. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press.
Search in Google Scholar
Fiedler, Lesie A. 1960 Love and death in the American novel. New York: Criterion Books.
Search in Google Scholar
Ford, Richard 1996 Independence Day. Boston: Little Brown & Company.
Search in Google Scholar
Freeman, Mary Wilkins 1992 The uncollected stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman. (Edited by Mary R. Reichardt.) Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
Search in Google Scholar
Freeman, Mary Wilkins 1992a "The slip of the leash", in: Mary Wilkins Freeman 1992, 95-105.
Search in Google Scholar
Frost, Robert 1967 Complete poems of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Search in Google Scholar
Frost, Robert 1967a "Directive", in: Robert Frost 1967, 520-521.
Search in Google Scholar
Gardner, John 1978 On moral fiction. New York: Basic Books.
Search in Google Scholar
Gilbert, Susan 1999 "Paths to escape", in: Joanne M. Braxton (ed.), 99-110.
Search in Google Scholar
Hartely, B. Cecil. 1865 Life of Daniel Boone. Philadelphia: John E. Potter.
Search in Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1983 Novels. (Edited by Millicent Bell.) New York: The Library of America.
Search in Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1983a The house of the seven gables, in: Nathaniel Hawthorne 1983, 347-627.
Search in Google Scholar
James, Henry 1955 The notebooks of Henry James. (Edited by F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock.) New York: George Braziller.
Search in Google Scholar
Kerouac, Jack 1950 The town and the city. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Search in Google Scholar
Kesey, Ken 1976 One flew over the cuckoo's nest. New York: Viking Penguin.
Search in Google Scholar
Lavender, David 2000 The great West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Search in Google Scholar
Lawrence, D. H. 1965 Studies in classic American literature. London: Mercury.
Search in Google Scholar
Levine, Philip 1996 The simple truths. New York: Knopf.
Search in Google Scholar
Levine, Philip 1996a "Ask for nothing", in: Philip Levine 1996, 13.
Search in Google Scholar
Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl 2000 Women's movement: Escape as transgression in North American feminist fiction. Amsterdam - Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.
Search in Google Scholar
Millay, Edna St. Vincent 1998 Early poems. (Edited by Holly Peppe.) New York: Penguin Books.
Search in Google Scholar
Millay, Edna St. Vincent 1988a "Travel", in: Edna St. Vincent Millay 1988, 99.
Search in Google Scholar
Morris, Wright 1978 The territory ahead. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Search in Google Scholar
Murray, Albert 1990 The omni-Americans: Some alternatives to the folklore of white supremacy. New York: De Capo Press.
Search in Google Scholar
O'Neill, Eugene 1924 Beyond the horizon. London: Jonathan Cape.
Search in Google Scholar
Olson, Charles 1947 Call me Ishmael: A study of Melville. San Francisco: City Light Books.
Search in Google Scholar
Parkes, Henry Bamford 1973 "Metamorphoses of Leatherstocking", in: Philip Rahv (ed.), 431-445.
Search in Google Scholar
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart 2000 Three spiritualist novels. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Search in Google Scholar
Rahv, Philip (ed.) 1973 Literature in America. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.
Search in Google Scholar
Rilke, Reiner Maria 1939 Duino elegies. (Translated By J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender.) New York: W. W. Norton.
Search in Google Scholar
Rockland, Michael Aaron 1990 "American mobility", in: Ray B. Browne et al. (eds.), 59-74.
Search in Google Scholar
Roethke, Theodore 1975 The collected poems of Theodore Roethke. New York: Anchor Books-Doubleday.
Search in Google Scholar
Roethke, Theodore 1975a "The far field", in: Theodore Roethke 1975, 193-195.
Search in Google Scholar
Santayana, George 1937 Character and opinion in the United States. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Search in Google Scholar
Semrau, Janusz 2010 Transcribing the territory; or, rethinking resistance. A study in classic American fiction. Łódź - Warszawa: SWSPiZ.
Search in Google Scholar
Spender, Stephen 1974 Love-hate relations: English and American sensibilities. New York: Random House.
Search in Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude 1990 Selected writings of Gertrude Stein. (Edited by Carl Van Vechten.) New York: Vintage.
Search in Google Scholar
Steinbeck, John 1962 Travels with Charley: In search of America. New York: The Viking Press.
Search in Google Scholar
Tanner, Tony 2000 The American mystery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Search in Google Scholar
Thoreau, Henry David 1975 The selected works of Thoreau. (Edited by Henry Seidel Canaby, revised by Walter Harding.) Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Search in Google Scholar
Thoreau, Henry David 1975a Walden, in: Henry David Thoreau 1975, 245-465.
Search in Google Scholar
Updike, John 1960 Rabbit, run. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Search in Google Scholar
Viereck, Peter 1967 New and selected poems, 1932-1967. Indianapolis - New York - Kansas City: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Search in Google Scholar
Viereck, Peter 1967a "I alone am moving", in: Peter Viereck 1967, 3.
Search in Google Scholar
Whitman, Walt 1982 Complete poetry and collected prose. (Edited by Justin Kaplan.) New York: The Library of America.
Search in Google Scholar
Whitman, Walt 1982a "Song of myself", in: Walt Whitman 1982, 188-247.
Search in Google Scholar

Dubious American license: The first in flight

Abstract

Paradigm

My account