Alternative Imaginaries of Transport
Description
In July 2022, while megafires were devastating the the southwest coast of France, the mayor of one of the affected villages organized a boat gathering in front of the dunes where the pine trees were still burning. Beautiful drone footage showed yachts and powerful speedboats circling on the water.
The image is absurd: motorboats burning energy in support of an area ravaged by fire, the symptom of an environmental crisis caused by such human activities. But this absurdity reveals our collective difficulty in moving beyond a certain imaginary of the “machine for carrying around” (to paraphrase Le Corbusier’s “machines for living in”). It is as if our imagination were trapped in that circle of motorboats, unable to do away with the fantasy of machines that are bigger, faster and safer.
The same applies to the circulation of information. The transport of information involves movement but the physical conveyor of information is not transported per se. After WWII, and cybernetics, information and media theories introduced something new in our imaginary of transport affecting our cartographic imagination in multiple ways. However, it seems our means of information transport are also fast, big, and safe—and therefore energy-intensive. We even speak of information superhighways.
Yet some forms of transport escape this imaginary field. The bicycle is the most obvious example: it is neither big, nor fast, sometimes not even safe. The machine and the body become one and the same thing, the body the very agent of its transportation. One can also be transported by love (an expression more common in French and Italian). In love, what is transported seems to escape the duality between matter—or bodies—and information. The same holds for dreams. In Poetique de la rêverie, Bachelard identifies a paradox in the “transport of the dreamer into another world,” where they are both the same and different. The case of Sisyphus is also a counterexample: he is not a cargo ship, not even a delivery man, and he transports stones, which are not goods.
The purpose of this seminar is not so much to analyze the role of this transport-machine imaginary in the development of capitalism, colonial enterprises, or the formation of a centralized state. We invite proposals that explore alternative imaginaries of transport which can range from lowtechs to dreams and drugs, or from the image of Sisyphus to that of pregnancy. Alternative imaginaries of transport can be identified in fiction especially in science-fiction or fantasy. The seminar will encourage proposals dealing with the forms of spatiality and worldliness alternative imaginaries of transport entail, and the subjectivities they imply—ones that no longer conform to the two-fold distinctions of passengers versus goods, matter versus information, space versus times. Depending on submissions, one of the three sessions of the seminar will be devoted to research-based creative approaches.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
I am a Senior Lecturer at Princeton University, currently working on a critical edition of Nicolas Bouvier’s L’Usage du monde (Droz, forthcoming 2026). I have directed a volume of La Revue des Lettres modernes on bicycle travel narratives (À plume et à pédales. Voyages cyclistes, 2022) and published several articles on authors such as Bouvier, Claude Lévi-Strauss or Éric Chevillard. A bio and list of selected publications can be found here ; here is my Academia profile.
Speaker Bio
Elaine Després is an associate professor at UQAM. After completing a thesis on mad scientists in literature, published in 2016, she has worked on topics such as the posthuman, dystopias, post-apocalyptic imagery, science fiction, and television series. In 2020, she published Le posthumain descend-il du singe? Littérature, évolution et cybernétique (PUM), while the dossier she co-edited on nostalgia for the future and retrofuturism appeared in September 2025 in the journal Captures.
Speaker Bio
Jackson B. Smith he received his Ph.D. in French from Princeton University in 2024 and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College. His articles have appeared in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Fixxion, French Forum, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and Symposium. He is also the translator and editor of Eternal Current Events, a book of the French filmmaker Chris Marker’s early writings.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Arnaud Regnauld is Professor of American Literature and Translation Studies, Vice-Rector for Internationalization at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis and the Academic Coordinator of ERUA - European Reform University Alliance. His most recent research focuses on new forms of textuality in the digital era and their translation as well as on the relationship between art, literature and philosophy, and the theorization of the cybertranslator’s task.
Speaker Bio
Sylvie Bauer is Professor of US literature at the Université Rennes 2 (France). Her work focuses more particularly on contemporary US literature, on the immoral universe of language, on the relation between art and technology and on contemporary issues related to biotechnologies. The author of a book on the work of Walter Abish, she has also written a number of papers on the novels of Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, Richard Powers or Ben Marcus, to name but a few.
Speaker Bio
Icare Bamba is currently working on a thesis in philosophy and design under the supervision of Pr. Dr. Pierre Cassou-Noguès (Paris 8), and Gundolf S. Freyermuth (CGL). Entitled "Viande-Fantôme : Érotique de la Chair à l'Époque de sa Virtualisation Totale", his research focuses on the metamorphoses undergone by our subjectivities in virtual experiences, questioned from the point of view of our material and embodied situations. It explores the symbioses that emerge from our machinic relationships.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Gwen Le Cor is Professor of American Literature and English for Specific Purposes at Université Paris 8, and is a member of the TransCrit research lab. She is a member of a COST Action (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) on “Artistic Intelligence - Responsiveness, accessibility, responsibility, equity” (2024-2028) . She co-edited several volumes including Textual Fluidity, or Why We Need to Acknowledge Poetry Books in Multiple Versions.
Speaker Bio
Michael McGillen is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Shapes of Time: History and Eschatology in the Modernist Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2023) as well as articles on history, temporality, and spatial modes of thinking in writers such as Uwe Johnson, Erich Auerbach, Franz Kafka, and W. G. Sebald.
Speaker Bio
Hélène Machinal is full professor at the University Rennes 2. She is a specialist of science-fiction, gothic and detective fiction from the 19th century to the contemporary period. She also works on popular fiction and TV shows, mythical figures and scientific imagination, and is a specialist of the posthuman. Her latest book is Posthumains en série, les détectives du futur (University Press of Tours, 2020). Her latest research focus on contemporary feminist dystopias and the anthropocene.