‘With the tremendous acceleration of life, mind and eye have become accustomed to seeing and judging partially or inaccurately, and everyone is like the traveller who gets to know a land and its people from a railway carriage.’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878)
In a 1993 article entitled ‘The Second Railway Age’, David Banister and Peter Hall wrote that ‘[t]ransport technologies seldom make a comeback, save in nostalgia trips for well-heeled tourists. . . . But there is a spectacular exception: railways, written off thirty years ago as a Victorian anachronism’ (157). In fact, there have been several ‘spectacular comebacks’ in the history of the railway: from the futuristic streamliners of the 1930s to the bullet trains of the 1970s and the magnetic levitation trains of the future, railways have repeatedly reinvented themselves to suit the technological, cultural, and symbolic needs of different phases of modernity. In the present day, we are witnessing yet another transformation: having once fuelled the modern industrial capitalist society that produced our current environmental crisis, railways are now being championed as tracks towards a greener and more sustainable future (see Revill 2012, 211-255).
Throughout their history, trains have transported not only passengers and freight, but also manifold cultural, political, and ideological narratives. From Charles Dickens’s proto-modernist railway sketches to the post-apocalyptic Korean film Snowpiercer, from James Bond’s train top fights to the space train in the Japanese manga series Galaxy Express 999, the railway has fuelled fantasies about mobility, progress, conquest, and connection. In the nineteenth-century US, for instance, the transcontinental railroad spatialized the ideology of manifest destiny (see White 2011); for interwar Europe, railways signified the utopia of a unified continent; on the Indian subcontinent, trains functioned as the long arm of empire before becoming associated with Indian nationalism (e.g. in Ravi Chopra’s 1980 action film The Burning Train). As literal and metaphorical vehicles, trains have carried multiple, often contradictory meanings. For the American Romantic Henry David Thoreau, they signalled the oppressive structures of society (‘We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us’). In African American culture, they have been linked to slavery and segregation but also been envisaged as speculative engines of resistance and social change (see Zabel 2004), as in Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Underground Railroad. Across a range of cultures and periods, railways have represented the hegemonic orders of the modern world while holding out disruptive and transgressive possibilities.
In these narratives, the railway is frequently connected to historically specific aesthetic experiences. In his landmark study The Railway Journey (1974), Wolfgang Schivelbusch argued that the experience of speed facilitated a new ‘panoramic perception’ of the landscape while also contributing to a phenomenological experience of the world as mobile, fleeting, and fragmentary. Since the beginnings of railway travel, writers and artists have translated these aesthetic experiences into the expressive possibilities of different media. Nineteenth-century poets, for instance, explored the rhythm of the rails through the rhythm of poetic language (e.g. Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘From a Railway Carriage’); writers of crime fiction – most famously Agatha Christie in Murder on the Orient Express – used the spatial structure of the train to reflect on the narrative conventions of crime fiction; for early filmmakers – think of the Lumière Brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train (1896)or the many ‘phantom rides’ of silent cinema – the train was a double of the cinema as a technology of movement and vision; and visual artists such as Umberto Boccioni translated the experience of speed into the abstractions of futurist art. At the same time, trains themselves have been figured as aesthetic objects. In the 1930s, for instance, industrial designers fashioned locomotives as works of art emblematic of techno-utopian futures; more recently, high-speed trains have embodied the ‘flow, efficiency and ergonomics of modern design’ (Revill 2012, 249), contrasting with the heavy industrial aesthetics of nineteenth-century steam trains.
Attendance to the conference is free, and you can enter the campus through the Guest Entrance.
The conference is organised by Tampere University, Sapienza University of Rome, and University of Zurich and the final day of the conference is hosted by İstanbul Bilgi University. Any queries or enquiries regarding the conference can be directed to Prof Johannes Riquet via johannes.riquet@tuni.fi and Dr Demet Karabulut Dede via demet.karabulut@bilgi.edu.tr
For more information about the conference, please visit:
https://research.tuni.fi/plural-en/event/call-for-papers-railway-aesthetics-experiencing-locomotion-across-media-and-cultures/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaekmrQWHst86wG1fy8tkJdBlJZR98lnovqHlkSigBJm5JUArnIqbR1U6PIkdw_aem_HyZApwLxO6vif7d75UuEag
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