Oral de littérature étrangère en langue étrangère: l'imagination

ORAL LELE : L'IMAGINATION

I'm going to talk about the notion « The Imagination ». Several themes make up this notion as: the science fiction, the fantasy, the absurd ... ect. The imagination does not reflect the world by the art of the faithful description but rather by the art of the allegory.

We can wonder which are the various visions of the travel time which are presented in these works ?

To answer it, I am going to use the extract of « Looking Backward » written in 1887 by Edward BELLAMY. In this extract a man wakes up in the year 2000 while he is put to sleep in 1887. He wakes up after having slept one hundred and thirteen years.

The second document is an extract from « The Time Machine », a movie realized by George Pal, taken out in 1960. It is inspired by the novel of H.G. Wells. On December 31st, 1899, in London, George, an inventor, discusses the subject of the fourth dimension with four of his friends and asserts them that he invented a machine to explore the time.

And the personal document that I chose is the movie « Project Almanac », a science fiction film of Dean Israelite taken out in 2015. David Raskin, a 17-year-old young man, who lives in Atlanta, in Georgia, finds the way, by means of his two best friends Quinn Goldberg and Adam and of her sister, to create a machine to travel in the time. Enthusiasts at the idea of experimenting their invention, they forget that their behavior in the past can have disastrous consequences on the present and the future.

In these three works, time travel is not visited in the same way.

In « Looking Backward », Bellamy didn't linger over the description of the journey. He simply evoked the front and after journey. Time travel, in itself, isn't going to be the main element of the book. In this text, contrary to the other works, the character didn't choose to do it. He did not create machines etc...

On the other hand, in the extract of « The Time Machine » that we saw in class, the description of the time travel is omnipresent : The evolution of the mankind, the places, his feelings, the clothes, the architectures, the landscape. Contrary to the first document, the character chooses to travel in the time. But he cannot choose the date where he wants to go.

To finish, in the movie « Project Almanac » the characters find a machine. They don't know to what it is of use but they decideto use it. When they once used it, they begins again. Contrary to the previous document, they can choose places and dates. The characters use it to have fun contrary in « The Time Machine ».

To conclude we can say that there are differents ways to evoke the time travel, whether it is a travel described or not. Chooses or not. Etc.

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