A Voyage Through and With Floating Man-Made Islands

Sonia Andras (“Babes-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania) [BIO]

Email: sonia_torriatte@yahoo.com

 

ABSTRACT:

My paper is analysing the theme of travel from a different standpoint: the voyage through and with floating man-made islands, a floating heterotopia between the lands, between nature and civilization, between life and death on the sea or in space, depending on the viewpoint. When asked why he wouldn’t leave the ship to begin a shore-person life, the man said that “the land is a ship too big for me”. That man, suggestively called Nineteen Hundred (or Novecento in the novel that inspired the movie The Legend of 1900) was born, raised and eventually died on a cruise ship, never to see or touch the land. Can this alternative man-made land assure one’s normal existence? Or is the island omnipresent in the dreams shaping our existence. What is it that land has which makes us loathe it? Why do we search for some kind of a personalized Eden? These are some questions I plan to touch with my paper, while insisting on a particular type of island: the artificial kind which also serves as a means of transportation, starting from Jules Verne, going through Novecento and its movie and ending with some examples of the futuristic view of the land-ship (Enterprise and so on).