Jules Verne's 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.
In the history of world literature, there is probably no writer whose reputation has been more associated with machines, technology, and the future than Jules Verne. From the 1860s to [...]