1 The archetypal road-myth: from the highway to the Matrix

The paper examines the persistence and permutations of the archetypal road myth. Its main motif is the traveler, who after getting in touch with the unknown in his wanderings, experiences a mythological and ontological shift. The genealogy of this kind of fables is correlated with spatial transformations of urban and rural America, through the theory of Michel de Certeau about the spatial interpretation of stories. The construction of highways and later on the Interstates network caused immense changes in the landscape, urban and rural forms and social practices. However, the archetypal road myth seems to persist and survive through these changes, adapting in these changes and mutating in the form of myths, screenplays and pulp fiction. Even nowadays, the construction of the information superhighways, which generate a new urban geography, causes a revival of this myth in a totally new context. The main question to be addressed is the work of this story in this transitional social and cultural context: why does it prove recurrent and what role does it play in the formation of social ethics and spatial perception