Hotels, Motels and Inns : Transient Spaces of Hospitality in English-Speaking Cultures
Toulouse, France
Organization: University Toulouse Jean Jaurès
The “Hotels, Inns and Motels” International Conference in Toulouse invites scholars to reflect upon the way places of temporary hospitality have structured space and displacements in English-speaking countries and therefore reveal the stakes and forms of hospitality. From British 19th-century inns to the motel chains dotting the endless US interstate landscapes, these spaces offer a temporary home to their dwellers, and perform commercial, social, political and symbolic functions that so far have not been studied thoroughly.
The aim of the conference is to explore how these places, and the people who designed them, work or live there, can reflect or create conceptions of hospitality that provide insight into a given society or a period.
The variety of temporary lodgings (from cheap inns or roadside motels to luxury hotels in capitals or resorts) offers many perspectives to be explored from historical, sociological, economic, literary and artistic viewpoints.
As a literal topos, a common place, the hotel can be viewed as a metonymy of the society or area it is set in, from the corporeal to the global level. As such, hotels have been chosen as the setting of numerous creative works, be it in literature (Daphne du Maurier, Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton, E.M. Foster, Elizabeth Bowen, Agatha Christie, Vladimir Nabokov, Stephen King, John Irving, Sam Shepard, Russell Banks, Don Delillo...), in art (Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, John Register, Robert Mapplethorpe…), or in film (Grand Hotel 1932, Psycho 1960, The Night Porter 1974, The Shining 1980, Barton Fink 1991, Mystery Train 1989, Lost in Translation 2003, The Grand Budapest Hotel 2014…). Hospitality venues are social microcosms that embed the power, gender, class and race relations of a given community. For instance, it is nowadays common to see hotels used as emergency lodgings for displaced, migrant, or homeless persons and families, transforming a temporary lodging into a permanently precarious home. Some hotel jobs are particularly gendered or racialized (innkeeper, waitress, concierge, chambermaid, bell boy…) and therefore duplicate the power structures and the spatial segregations at work for certain social, racial or gender groups. This aspect has been studied from a contemporary sociological point of view, but rarely from a historical perspective, nor within literary or film representations.
The hotel can be seen as the very locus of the Unheimlich, with its anonymous rooms which are magically appropriated by their dwellers, transformed into homes once the key worked the door open. Hotels can fascinate because of their uncanny ordinariness, and their capacity to produce intimate spaces where the customers feel at home even though they never lived there before. The liminal positioning of the hotel, on the threshold between the familiar and the strange, make them the ideal place for a fresh perspective on the quotidian, for a unique angle from which one can take in the complexity of the ordinary, as philosopher Bruce Bégout underscores in Common Place: The American Motel (Los Angeles: Otis Books, 2010).
On the other hand, the isolation of the hotel room can also oblige its dwellers to face their own self, accentuating the ontological solipsism of individuals (see Bégout 34), and causing experiences of depersonalization, or dereliction. And as a space successively dwelled in by a multitude of guests, the hotel room is a palimpsest of ghostly presences.
The motel, contrary to the luxury hotel located in a historical city center, seems to encompass many of the paradoxes of temporary hospitality, because of its architecture and its marginal location on roadsides. According to Bégout, motels symbolize a place in which “the center no longer holds, but has given way to a transitive and mobile space in which a connection to the world has been lost” (Common Place 12). However motels also imply the concrete, personal, and corporeal engagement of their dwellers. They produce unique forms of inhabiting space, loaded with symbolic power.
Hotels also make business with intimate spaces, revealing and defining a system of norms and transgressions. The hotel is the epitome of a space in the margins, of transience and anonymity, and it henceforth allows for illicit or immoral relationships, and encourages furtive encounters that leave no trace. Owing to the poor quality of the building materials used in many hostels and motels, spaces meant to be private and intimate are made visible and audible. The hotel is thus inherently hospitable to stories of desire and death, as depicted in numerous news reports, novels and films.
Hotels have also shaped, inspired and defined the topoi and characteristics of certain literary genres (the travelogue, the realistic novel, the road novel, the detective story) or cinematographic genres (the road movie, the horror film). A specific aesthetic, rooted in a dialectic of fear or horror and wonder, or disenchantment and re-enchantment, has developed over the centuries and in literature and works of art that have chosen the hotel as their setting.
Hotels, inns and motels have also been privileged places where many authors have written their books and where artists have created their works of art (such as Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie, Vladimir Nabokov, Tennessee Williams, Andy Warhol and all the underground artists he brought together at the Chelsea Hotel in the 1960s) and where even more film personalities have stayed while shooting major movies.
Participants will be invited to reflect on hotel hospitality in the English-speaking world over the centuries, in order to shed light on the characteristics of particular countries, cities or periods, the aesthetics of particular genres or movements, and their persistence in the present day.
As a privileged setting for social structures and art (narrative and figurative), conceived both as a place of passage and as a closed space, the liminal, public, anonymous and intimate space of the hotel is conducive to the exploration of
- themes of isolation, solitude or introspection (Edward Hopper), personal narratives (Sophie Calle, Nan Goldin);
- The intersection between the outer and inner worlds;
- Redefining identities, distancing, escape and psychological transformation or depersonalisation;
- The hotel as a place of transit during journeys, or transitions: points of departure, pivotal moments, places where artists create and authors write;
- Away-from-home encounters of characters in search of meaning (Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, 2003);
- Transgressions of social, realistic and moral norms;
- The exploration of anxiety, the blurring of reality in oppressive, ghostly atmospheres where social order and normality can break down, allowing horror to unfold, as in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) or Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980);
- Hotels as microcosms: at once public and intimate spaces, places that market confinement, they epitomize social tensions and human behaviour (from the tranquil ambience of luxury hotels to emergency shelters).
Keynote addresses will be given by:
· Barbara Black, Skidmore College, USA, author of Hotel London. How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories (Ohio State Press, 2019)
· Anna Despotopoulou, National University of Athens, Greece, leader of the research project ‘Hotels and the Modern Subject, 1890-1940,’ (https://hotems.enl.uoa.gr/) which ran from 2020-2023, as part of the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation.
· Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, Penn State University, USA, author of Hotel: An American History (Yale University Press, 2007).
Proposals for papers must be submitted no later than 20 January 2025. Each proposal must include :
-A 300-word abstract of the paper
-A short biography
Papers will be accepted in French and English.
Proposals should be sent to the following addresses :
muriel.adrien@univ-tlse2.fr
marie.bouchet@univ-tlse2.fr
Marie Bouchet