Jules Verne\u27s Dream Machines: Technology and Transcendence

This article discusses how Verne mythologizes and poeticizes his fictional machines. More than just a means for solving problems and/or for providing access to exotic geographical locales, Verne’s technology is portrayed as being intrinsically poetic. Bridging the worlds of the industrial and the artistic, Verne’s machines constitute a new kind of objet d’art. Anthropomorphized to make them seem less coldly mechanical, these devices take on a life of their own and exist in a richly symbiotic relationship with their creators. Such machines transport the readers of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires beyond the mimetic, serving both as a means to build verisimilitude and as a stepping-stone to transcend the real