Selected Journal Articles
Baldwin’s French: Creative Critical Perspectives. James Baldwin Review (In preparation)
‘Deux étés’ (1997): The (Auto)fiction of the French Translation of Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Ada or Ardor’ (1969). Life Writing: The Translation Memoir. Vol 21. 2024
Strong memories : Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov and autobiography. Americana, e-Journal of American Studies. Vol. 12 No. 2. Fall 2016
Off the Beaten Track: Jack Kerouac on Robert Frank. Moveable Type, Vol. 8, UCL Press. 2016
Chapters in Edited Collections
Roadside Locations and Imagery: Icons, Objects and Landmarks. The Oxford Handbook of Mobility in Literature, OUP. (Forthcoming 2028)
Teaching Translation as Close-Reading Exercise. Unending Translation: Creative-Critical Experiments in Translation and Life Writing. UCL Press, Literature and Translation Series. (Forthcoming 2026)
“Stationary Trivialities”: Contrasting Representations of the American Motel in Vladimir Nabokov and Jack Kerouac. Mobilities, Literature, Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019
“A Peculiar Relationship with Life”: Netting the Butterfly Hunter in Lila Azam Zanganeh’s The Enchanter. Writers' Biographies and Family Histories in 20th- and 21st-Century Literature, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018
The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film, and Photography: 1955–1985 (Palgrave Macmillan, Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture Series, 2020) traces the origin of a postmodern iconography of mobile consumption equating roadside America with an authentic experience of the United States through the postwar road narrative, a narrative which, Elsa Court argues, has been shaped by and through white male émigré narratives of the American road, in both literature and visual culture. While stressing that these narratives are limited in their understanding of the processes of exclusion and unequal flux in experiences of modern automobility, the book works through four case studies in the American works of European-born authors Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Frank, Alfred Hitchcock, and Wim Wenders to unveil an early phenomenology of the postwar American highway, one that anticipates the works of late-twentieth-century spatial theorists Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Marc Augé and sketches a postmodern aesthetic of western mobility and consumption that has become synonymous with contemporary America.
“The American Roadside takes the titanic leviathan of the American highway and, through careful unfurling of its ostensibly homogeneous network of routes, turnpikes, and rest stops, lays bare one of the most provocative and indeed recognizable American spaces.”
— Will Carroll, The Journal of American Studies, October 2021
“Written with brio – especially when the book veers off the highway of academic writing – The American Roadside offers new perspectives on well-known works.”
— Douglas Field, The Times Literary Supplement, January 2021
“Engaging and illuminating study. … Court opens up new inroads for looking at American literary and film history. … The achievement of this highly readable book is to send us back to these otherwise familiar artworks with refreshed, more inquisitive eyes.”
—Neil Archer, Review 31, May, 2020