La représentation de la machine dans la trilogie d’anticipation scientifique d’Albert Robida : du texte à l’image et de l’image au texte
This thesis focuses on the presentation of the machine by Robida. The major part of our research aims to reveal its meanings and examines its literary and visual settlement in each novel in the most popular trilogy of scientific anticipation made by the author. The search has the aspect of a continuous travel between what is read and what is seen, the said and the unsaid, the literary description and the imagination, the reality and the fiction. We will be mainly interested by the evolution of Albert Robida’s vision: in Le Vingtième siècle, the image of a beneficial machine, simplifying every day’s life, saving time and money and largely contributing to the happiness and the entertainment of every man’s kind, except some occasional accidents, is reflected by a close and helpful connection between the text, the vignette and the inserts. This image is modified, in La Guerre au vingtième siècle, into an anxiety felt towards the use of the machine as a war weapon, and expressed in the transfer of the narration to the illustration in-texte, aiming to touch the reader and make him aware of the violent and brutal aspect of the machines that are only named. This image causes, in La Vie électrique, a serious pessimistic vision of the use of the machine in the society and the power of the scientific knowledge in the future which is displayed in dark and gloomy hors-texte.  In this context, the illustrated machine requires a double reading, details oriented and interested in the presence and the absence of elements, in the transfer between the text and the illustration, in the anticipated or the belated picture, in the relationship between the text, the image and the caption, in the words that have been transferred to the image and mostly the rest of the incomplete picture.  In Robida’s work, the praises that become a criticism and the satire being cynicism, are very representatives of the hopes and the fears created by the discovery and the application of the electricity, by its virtues, but also its uncontrollable aspect.
Machine Description Illustration Satire Scientific anticipation Criticism Society