Since the emergence of the automobile as a mass commodity in the early twentieth century, natural themes and imagery have been used to flesh out and concretize these two principles of spatial epistemology—the pursuit of spatial novelty and a spatial phenomenology that privileges spectacle—by attaching a utopian flavor to movement through space. “We shall solve the city problem,” Henry Ford once quipped, “by leaving the city.” From the 1920s onward, car advertising has invoked the fantasy of leaving behind the constraints of a crowded, mundane and polluted urban environment for the wide-open spaces offered by nature. Charting the evolution of automotive promotional discourse, Andrew Wernick argues that the reliance upon natural imagery intensified in the 1970s and 1980s as people grew disenchanted with technology (and its militaristic overtones) and expressed concerns over growing traffic congestion, energy consumption and road construction. Among the easiest tactics for advertisers wishing to deflect the negative associations invoked by the car was, and remains, an image-based rearticulation of cars with nature. For both producers and consumers, the association of automobiles with (travel to) pristine natural environments helps to forget the vast resources and infrastructure required to support car based societies as well as the enormous ecological consequences that accompany their mass production. In an American context, the use of natural imagery also taps deeply into core national myths. Thomas Jefferson, for example, famously idealized the authenticity and moral supremacy of life in the country, an idea that has been replayed in countless texts and venues over the past two centuries in which a redemptive arc is traced from the corruption of the city to the honesty, virtue, and community of the small town. Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” which has become deeply embedded in popular culture (if somewhat discredited in academic scholarship) traces a similar trajectory in defining the essential strength and vigor of U.S. moral character and democracy as a product of the struggle to carve a new life out of the wilderness and, conversely, suggesting the likely atrophy of such virtues in an urban environment. The recent popularity of sentimental and often melancholy tributes to the declining role that nature plays in everyday life, best expressed perhaps in Bill McKibben’s bestsellers The End of Nature and The Age of Missing Information, confirm the ongoing purchase that this dream of escaping the city for the sensual bliss of nature has on the popular imagination.

The flight from urban to natural space looms large in automobile ads of today, ranging from the carefully crafted stories of big budget national campaigns to generic footage of vehicles racing through natural landscapes that populate spots for local dealers. Cities or, more accurately, the monotonous routines that often seem to dominate urban and suburban existence are regularly targeted by advertisers. A typical ad for Saab, for instance, paints an Orwellian portrait of social life as characterized by endless sameness: row upon row of identical suburban homes, identical suitcases on an airport trolley, identical office cubicles, identical dresses in a clothing store and, lastly, identical black sedans in a parking garage. Puzzled, confused, and disoriented, the commercial’s protagonists shuffle about aimlessly in a bland, urban dystopia of complete homogeneity. Finally, salvation arrives in the form of a silver Saab convertible that offers its young driver the opportunity to stand out from the crowd. As the growl of its engine mixes with the chorus “I’m free” sung by The Who, the vehicle slowly pulls out of a parking garage, leaving a stunned onlooker speechless with wonder. “In a world of sameness, you can still maintain your identity.” It is a familiar refrain, duplicated ad nauseam since marketers discovered the counterculture in the 1960s, yet still a popular formula in marketing discourse.

16. The primary purpose of the passage is to

A. compare the different methods by which advertisers attempt to influence consumers
B. question whether connecting automobile advertisements to nature imagery is ethical
C. present evidence suggesting that advertising using images of nature is more effective than ads without those types of images
D. discuss the benefits associated with living outside of an urban area
E. analyze the reasoning behind and implications of a certain type of marketing





The passage implies which of the following about Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis?”

A. It is more a part of American culture than is Jefferson’s idealization of country life.
B. Academics who write about the thesis often do so in a critical manner.
C. It attributes certain values to the effort expended on the American frontier.



In the context in which it appears, “purchase” most nearly means

A. allure
B. security
C. exchange
D. hold
E. dominance