Paleophonic Futures: Charles Cros's Audiovisual Worlds

Robida’s Mormons

“…Not surprisingly, these studies have devoted little attention to Mormonism in his oeuvre, as it seems so incidental to his prolific record. 6 Scholars of late drawn to media, science and technology have illuminated Robida's literary and graphic intuitions about dystopian industrialism, consumerism and proto-cinematic or polyphonic inventions by situating Robida's imaginative schemes in relation to other futuristic fiction and the history of technology (Barel-Moisan; Boillat; Brehm;Willems, 1999;Willems, 2016). My analysis should set well with the methodological assumptions of recent scholarship, notably the insistence that Robida's work "involves both forward-looking and retrospective vision" (Brehm 194) but is very much grounded in the milieu of Third Republic France (Barel-Moisan; Letourneux).…”