"The Subway Series"
A Joint Colloquium Between Harvard History of Science and MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society Secondary Worlds of Jules Verne Roz Williams, MIT Abstract: This talk deals in a cluster of "seconds" as they relate to the life and work of Jules Verne (1828-1905). First, briefly, I discuss the problems of employing the concept of Second Nature in historical studies and make a pitch for the value of imaginative literature as a source of evidence and insight into major transformations of the material world. Then I describe, also briefly, Verne's years in Paris during the Second Empire, when he was involved in both a variety of cultural circles ranging from romantic drama to popular science. The literary form he invented towards the end of his years in Paris--the geographic romance--celebrates the triumphs of second nature while also defying the bourgeois civilization represented by the Second Empire. Verne accomplishes this by creating a "Secondary World" (from J.R.R. Tolkien's 1939 lecture on fairylands) through mapping the entire globe in fiction. In this life-consuming project of Verne's, vehicles play an important role as tools of exploration and also as secondary worlds unto themselves, with their captains in a mixed roles of liberator and commander. I will conclude by showing how the submarine Nautilus (in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas) is not only a high-tech escape vehicle but also a slave ship; its story evokes the vessels still openly engaged in the slave trade out of Nantes, Verne's home city and the primary French port of that trade, at the time of his birth. Tuesday, December 8, 2009 4pm Located in Science Center 469 at Harvard University
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