In 1798, Elizabeth Moody, English poet and literary reviewer, published the poem “An Address by a Gentleman to His Dead Dog; Which Was Stuffed, and Placed in a Corner of His Library” as part of her collection, Poetic Trifles. And yet, despite the collection's title, I suggest that we can brush against the grain and read this poem seriously as adumbrating the complexities and dark side of taxidermy, still in its infancy.

If, Moody's poem suggests, the art of taxidermy might capture the shape or form of the pet named Prince, it fails to capture the “vital flame” of the “vivifying spark” that is now “extinct.” The speaker “explores” the taxidermied dog's face, a description suggesting the uncanny as it flickers between registers of the familiar and unfamiliar, as fur gives way to fuzziness. Prince, it seems, is now stuffed with uncertainty. Just who or what is Prince now? we might imagine the speaker wondering. The “Yes… / But” of the first stanza (which will find a rejoinder in the “Yet… / Still” of the second stanza) like a response to a question also reveals the way taxidermy calls to and disappoints the speaker. Taxidermy's ontological fuzziness and its failures are here, and elsewhere, part of its dark side.

Portions of this book were written in and inspired by the company of taxidermy in museums, galleries, and archives across America and England: from the large institutional collections at the Nature Lab at Rhode Island School of Design, the Smithsonian, the Manchester Museum, London's Natural History Museum, and Oxford's Natural History Museum to the quirky Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, a taxidermy-crammed basement collection in Hackney buried beneath an absinthe bar.

Recently, I returned to Oxford's Natural History Museum—that treasure trove of taxidermy. I was delighted to find that the Museum encourages its visitors to touch some of its taxidermy specimens: a cute and very soft fox perched on the Welcome Desk, and two big brown bears flanked either side of the entrance to the main exhibition hall. My pleasure in touching taxidermy here was only surpassed by something I overheard while wandering through the upper galleries: a little boy loudly and passionately announced, “That's DISGUSTING!” in response to seeing a case of stuffed birds. I continued to wander through the museum, still savoring his response out of admiration for the beastly freedom of it in breaking the otherwise quiet, breathless space of the museum. After all, the wild child, as Kalpana Rahita Seshadri puts it, is the one who “surprises the law” (165).

My delight was sustained by a second encounter, also between a child and taxidermy. Just before exiting the museum, as I stood petting the taxidermied fox, a little girl and her mother came up to join. Despite the mother's cooings that “it won't bite,” the girl stubbornly refused to listen to her. The girl seemed paralyzed by the taxidermy, surely caught in what Kristeva calls fear's “fluid haze” (6), and refused to touch the fox, as if it might spring to life under her fingers and bite. These fleeting encounters remind us that something of the negative sticks to our experiences with taxidermy; sometimes, even realistic, neutrally staged mounts in institutional settings, such as a natural history museum, can still conjure up those “ugly feelings” of disgust, fear, and anxiety.

Taxidermy can invite tender thinking about the fragility of bodies, human and nonhuman alike, and the myriad ways we can be beautifully, or monstrously, made and unmade under the hands of another. As novelist Kristen Arnett, in an essay for Hazlitt, writes:

Speaking to the violence and curation of her body, the ways her body has been touched and “fucked up,” a body that is both heimlich and unheimlich to herself, Arnett teases out the intimacies—the pleasures and the pains—and identifications between taxidermy and herself.

While it is possible to imagine taxidermy being included among those “pleasurable practices” that Stacey Alaimo suggests “may open up the human self to forms of kinship and interconnection with nonhuman nature” (Exposed 30), it is even easier to imagine the darker underbelly of this exposure. Indeed, what Gothic horror's treatment of taxidermy reveals is the polymorphous perversity within taxidermy, offering us a view of the dark side of kinship and corporeal horrors of interconnection, a dark side that becomes visible in the material encounter with taxidermy.

This chapter interrogates taxidermy's affinity in Gothic horror with the taboo, with the horror of dark desires that ought not to be there but that nevertheless remain. Many twentieth- and twenty-first century Gothic texts show a tendency to depict those with a taste for taxidermy as perverts, that is, those looking to bypass the demands of the external world (the reality principle, as Freud puts it). In Alice Munro's short story, “Vandals,” an example of the Southern Ontario Gothic, taxidermy becomes aligned with pedophilia; in Norma Lazo's short story “The Taxidermist (The Father)” (2003) a taxidermist father sexually abuses his own daughter; and a similar specter of incest and cycles of abuse haunt Kate Mosse's Gothic historical novel The Taxidermist's Daughter (2014).

Microtravel Now – The Emergence of a Term

The recent proliferation of neologisms based on the prefix micro- suggests that the early twenty-first century is a moment of renewed focus on the infinitely small – we say renewed because it is clear that other historical moments, notably the eighteenth century, are equally identified with a similar fascination with such granular detail and with finding the means of accessing it. While there is a metaphorical interest in the micro, evident for instance in Hannah Jane Parkison's focus on the ‘joy of small things’, this shift of scale is accompanied by literal attention to the minute. The reception of the work of the contemporary artist Willard Wigan – who uses a microscope to craft the ‘world's tiniest masterpieces’ – encapsulates this public fascination with the minuscule. The contrast (and often the tensions) between the micro- and the macro-, whether these relate to economics, nutrients, histories or a variety of other phenomena, regulate human lives in ways that are not always immediately apparent. The everyday presence of manifestations of the very small is, however, widespread. X (formerly Twitter) has become a seemingly ubiquitous (if not unproblematic) microblogging platform, the use of which was initially facilitated by the microcomputer reliant on a microprocessor; environmental concerns and the challenges of urban living have increased the use of microapartments, microcars and microvans; microbreweries, micropubs and microbakeries reflect a new small-scale entrepreneurialism that reflects a public appetite to avoid the overcommercialized and buy into a more individualized consumer experience. The Greek etymology of ‘micro-’ suggests in common parlance ‘very small’, but in terms of metric units, it is located between ‘milli-’ and ‘nano-’, designating one millionth. The growing use of the prefix is, in part, a symptom of advances in technology. Improvements in micrometry – measurement of the tiny – provide ever-increasing access to the minutiae of the world while at the same time catering for a persistent human curiosity regarding understanding the detail that surrounds us. At the same time, contemporary manifestations of this attention include countercultural dimensions, with a focus on the micro- reflecting the extreme version of a hyperlocalism that stands against globalization, environmental degradation and the spread of macro-level forces such as neoliberal economics.

The Epistemology of Beliefs in Boudon's Sociology

Epistemology is understood here in its broadest sense, as Raymond Boudon does from his earliest writings to his latest work (Boudon 2012, 2013). It pertains to the evaluation of any belief or knowledge to determine whether its endorsement by the social subject is justified and legitimate (Pouivet 2013, 17–18). In France, the term “epistemology” is often used in a much more restrictive sense. Since Bachelard, it has been reserved for a certain kind of philosophy of the natural sciences. As a result, political, moral, and religious beliefs are often discredited from the outset. They are declared out of scope a priori because they do not belong to the physical or biological sciences. The broader international definition is the one advocated by Boudon. For him, there is continuity between all areas of human adherence: natural sciences, but also rules of law or religious faith. In all cases, the individual believes that “an apple falls once it is detached from the tree” (natural science), “a red light means we should stop” (rule of law and conduct), or “our life continues (or not) after death” (faith). In all cases, sociologists must take these beliefs and knowledge seriously. They need to understand their epistemological foundations, especially from the point of view of the observed subject.

Does this mean that we should assimilate all beliefs? Certainly not. Boudon carefully distinguishes between individual and collective beliefs. He also separates, to better bring them together, descriptive and normative beliefs: the former are about the “true,” and the latter are about the “right.” These categories have their importance: natural sciences are about the “true,” whereas politics or morals are about the “right.” But the dividing line is more subtle: Is religion about the “true” or the “right”? Here, once again, let's take the notion of belief in its broadest sense to grasp the whole picture. Following Kant, we can also distinguish between different kinds of beliefs: knowledge, opinion, and faith (Cuin 2022, 34–35).

Introduction

The relationship between transnational migration and sexualities has always been complex. On the one hand, cross-border migration has been one of the most prominent forces that introduce migrants to new and diverse ways of engaging with sexualities as it exposes them to new sexual environments, norms, ideologies and practices within new social realities. On the other hand, transnational migration can impose certain constraints on migrants’ sexualities, because of factors ranging from those on the structural level, such as racial, ethnic and social class discrimination and unsuitable working and living arrangements, to the interpersonal level, such as the existence and surveillance of co-ethnic communities (Ahmad 2009; Cantú et al. 2009; Carrillo 2017; Hoang and Yeoh 2015). Despite such a dynamic relationship, the sexual dimension of cross-border migration has yet to receive adequate attention in mainstream sociological migration research (Carrillo 2017). Moreover, the sexuality of migration has been further complicated by the increasing developments of information and communication technologies, online media platforms, as well as diversified forms of migrants’ engagement with global and local sexual cultures and fields. While there is a vast spectrum of studies on migrants’ utilization of digital platforms for transnational connections, communication, business activities and identity formation, less has been said about how migrants engage with sexuality-related matters within digital spaces (Ang 2019; Shield 2019). This chapter contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of contemporary migrants’ engagement with sexuality by inquiring into how migrants’ sexualities in terms of sexual desirability and status are negotiated during transnational migration. Such a perspective, I argue, provides a good venture point to inquire into how the online and offline realities intertwine and affect one another in migrants’ social worlds.

The chapter engages with a case study of how male Vietnamese migrants in Japan negotiate their sexualities in terms of practices, desirabilities and statuses within transnational social spaces. This research population was chosen for two main reasons. Firstly, the number of Vietnamese migrants residing in Japan has rapidly increased, and they have become one of the most visible foreign populations in the country in the last decade. By the end of 2021, Vietnamese represented the second-largest group of foreign residents, the second-largest group of international students and the largest group of foreign workers in Japan (Ministry of Justice 2021).

As journalism develops in the Metaverse, it will reflect or parallel at least some of the characteristics of real-world news content. News content in the Metaverse will consist of facts and will emphasize the five Ws. Likewise, real-world news content about the Metaverse is also likely to follow the overall pattern and style of contemporary news content.

Important differences in the form of Metaverse journalism content are likely to emerge, however. These differences are much of what makes Metaverse journalism qualitatively different than journalism in traditional media environments. Metaverse journalism content is especially apt to a feature first-person point of view as is typical of user experiences inside the Metaverse. As the Metaverse itself will be a participatory environment, users will be increasingly comfortable with and likely to expect such a perspective. Because the Metaverse emphasizes interactivity, immersion, and multisensory communication, Metaverse journalism content will likely highlight such experiences. These will draw upon AR, VR, and other forms of XR as storytelling evolves toward immersive game-type formats that increasingly emphasize these qualities. Finally, Metaverse journalism will rest on a foundation of data-driven visualizations, soundscapes, and haptic experiences, especially in customizable, interactive, immersive, nonlinear, and dynamic formats, and these features will likely become endemic to Metaverse journalism content. The growing capacity of AI and data processing speed will fuel these developments.

This chapter assesses the potential for news content in the Metaverse. This assessment is based on an analysis of nine XR-designed news content productions. XR-designed news content is produced in a form potentially compatible with Metaverse platforms now or in the future. XR-designed news content could be imported to Metaverse platforms or linked to it via MR or other XR approaches via the immersive Web, which is increasingly a standard for Metaverse platforms.

Content is the focus of this chapter for several reasons. First, content is in many ways the essence of journalism. It is the material that engages and informs the public. It is what principally differentiates journalism from other industries. Second, earlier chapters have examined other key aspects of Metaverse journalism including the structures and systems of journalism, news economics, the technologies that enable it, the journalists (human or machine) that create it, and the practices that lead to and shape the news.

Creative artists, musicians and storytellers from migrant and refugee backgrounds in Australia and in other multicultural countries throughout the world explore their own ambivalence in relation to identity and belonging years after permanent settlement in their new home, and surprisingly, even writers and artists from subsequent generations. Smaro Kamboureli, a bilingual Canadian poet and literary critic of Greek heritage, refers to the literary phenomenon of biculturality as ‘a struggle between languages’ since the writer who experiences such a division is ‘the bastard child of the coming together of two selves of two geographies of two languages’. Antigone Kefala specifically shows this struggle in her paramythi Alexia: A Tale for Advanced Children, a semi-autobiographical, figurative story with varied narrative perspectives. Specifically, her tale shows how learning a new language is a linguistic and conceptual challenge as well as an ideological struggle between communal and individual ways of being for non-English speaking migrant writers.

Alexia reads as a socio-ethnographic comment on the challenges faced by migrants. The writer plays on words when raising the spectre of controversial historical events. Technically, she employs a style of writing that appropriates various oral traditions, including the oral stories she listened to in her formative years in Romania and the storytelling traditions used by other cultural groups she encountered in her travels to Oceania. She begins her historia (story) by parodying Indigenous folklore stories, ‘Once upon a time’, yet not so long ago, in a large island [called ‘Te Kore Roa’] in ‘the South Pacific, south west of Pago Pago’, but her translation of the etymological meaning of this place, as ‘The Wide Spread Nothing’, recalls Australia's colonial history with its claim upon Indigenous land based on the idea of terra nullius, which literally means land of ‘nothingness’. Kefala's reference to this Pacific Island, but especially its politically charged association, shifts the narrative beyond depicting a specific place to encompass the pervasive world reach of the colonial mentality with its varied racist, sexist and orientalist manifestations. The description of this place as having been ‘discovered many centuries earlier, by accident, while an explorer was pur-suing a giant octopus’, shows the entanglement between folklore myths and the rationalization of histories.

Dean Kalimnios, in an analogous way to his predecessor, Stylianos Charkianakis, is a Greek poet who identifies with his ancestral homeland and its Christian Orthodox traditions, even though he was born and raised in Australia. Both poets are refractory in a global literary context that privileges the secular and the transferable because they are tied to their heritage. Despite this spiritual connection to Greek culture, they can also be read as bridging multiculturalism with world literature because, despite speaking and writing in a minority language, they have a deep appreciation for and wide knowledge of many languages, histories and cultures. The fact that Kalimnios publishes his collections of poems only in the Greek language and without translation indicates cultural pride motivates his writing, or he chooses a radical positioning, employing what E. Grosz refers to as a ‘politics of difference implying the right to define oneself, others, and the world according to one's interests’. His poetry, then, represents an act of defiance against the universalization of English because his inclusion of other languages shows he resists what Bakhtin refers to as the literary phenomenon of ‘impermeable monoglossia’. He invites readers to imagine other worlds while ‘freeing consciousness from the tyranny of its own language’. Kalimnios appears to subscribe to traditional values; however, it is difficult to work out whether he is a religious surrealist or a proud neo-Hellenic scholar who appropriates various traditions for aesthetic purposes. Whatever his reasons – political, philosophical, religious or aesthetic – his most defining feature is his celebration in the Greek language. This is evident in the way he constructs neologisms and uses elevated diction, borrowing from ‘dialects and constructions that span the whole gamut of the Greek language, from Homer to Giannis Ritsos’. His diverse knowledge of words require translation as well as interpretation since the concepts he explores are obscure, and requires a broad knowledge of Greece's long history and its diverse linguistic traditions – the Achaic, philosophic, ecclesiastic, dialectic and demotic.

Two decades ago, I read Raymond Boudon's Pourquoi les intellectuels n’aiment pas le libéralisme. The book struck me as marvelously insightful about a pathological condition he saw already invading the discipline of sociology. I wrote a review of the book that was enthusiastic but not uncritical and pitched it to a few mainstream sociological journals.

It was rejected in all of them, and on the same grounds. Boudon, I was told by one of these journal's book review editors, is not well known in the Englishspeaking scholarly community. Though I gathered this was true, I was hardpressed to see this as a legitimate reason not to review an informative book by a little-known author. Such a review might better acquaint readers with a writer they ought to know. But the editor insisted. Boudon, he claimed, “repeats a good deal of crass, confused, ignorant conceptualisations of the people he attacks.[…] Such views appear in […] opinion pieces in newspapers.[…] They do not advance theoretical debate.” More, he continued, “we […] do not see any merit in asking our readers to spend time on this book and would not want to encourage anyone to buy it.” No substance whatsoever was offered on precisely what in Boudon's view of the discipline was “crass, confused [or] ignorant,” though I requested examples. It was asserted as something selfevidently true, requiring no argument or evidential support.

It is my impression that Boudon's reputation among English-speaking sociologists is likely no more widespread now than it was 20 years ago. This is to the detriment of those sociologists. I will suggest in this essay a major reason why Boudon's ideas, especially those that have to do with the knowledgeproducing propensities of social science intellectuals, are not likely to get much traction in this demographic group. It is because he is correct about the disinterest in scientific knowledge of that group and about the increasing power they exert in shaping the entire discipline.

My view, then and now, is that Boudon's perspective on the process by which intellectuals, and specifically sociologists, tend to cobble together frameworks for understanding the world is full of useful insights.

Greek Australian writers from both the first and second generation, consciously or unconsciously, have been drawing on the paramythi and transforming it in their works. This vernacular form was also used by the modernist Greek poets in the 1930s. When it functions as a literary trope, it has various manifestations. It may present as a comforting voice because it is familiar on the subliminal level of consciousness when it operates through folktale and demotic sayings, which uses various rhythms and verse forms similar to Greek folk poetry and songs, Byzantine hymns, parables/anecdotes/songs, proverbs or parables. Alternatively, it may have a subversive potential demystifying national history and its social mores. In Greek society, it has had a long history, and a wide scope, ranging from transmitting wise tales to revealing metaphysical truths found in religious parables, but also projecting non-naturalistic fantastical images, gossip and innuendo. This shows paramythi is resilient and adaptable, but it can also be an indicator of how the writers who use it for various aesthetic and political purposes are reacting to change, trauma and their past.

George Seferis, an internationally recognized twentieth-century Modern Greek poet, clearly articulated why Modern Greek poets during the 1930s and beyond were drawing on paramythia in their works. In his poem ‘Last Stop’ in his collection LOGBOOK ll, Seferis wrote:

The symbolic and literal use of paramythic motifs and rhythms for Seferis signifies escapism from the pain of the incomprehensibility of living through war, destruction and exile. This poet was not alone in this as there were others such as Nikos Gatsos, Milton Sachtouris, Andreas Embirikos and Odysses Elytis with an acute sensitivity to the despair around them in post-war twentieth-century Europe. This particular generation has been characterized as moving away from the negative despair of the previous generation of the 1920s with famous poets such as Kostas Karyotakis. According to Yoryis Yiatromanolakis, poets began to adopt an affirmative, optimistic world view indicated in their use of paramythic motifs such as youth and spring and running waters, written in free verse.

On the Limits of Microtravel and Microspection

Travel writing is a literary form that seems to have undergone regular reinvention. This is in part because it is a genre that has always foretold the loss of diversity whilst constantly recalibrating – through the identification and practice of phenomena such as microtravel – the ways in which we (re)experience and (re)define elsewhere. However enabling of new approaches microtravel may prove to be, proposing any understanding of the genre through its lens requires nevertheless certain caveats, relating not least to the ethics of privileging or metaphorizing confinement and restriction. Various modes of what Jean-Didier Urbain understands as positively ‘claustrophilic’ microtravel are, for instance, to be attenuated as they are nothing new to those rendered physically immobile by disability, incarceration or other forms of geographical limitation. We also need to acknowledge similar limitations in the romanticization of walking, a form of locomotion whose praise tends to be in direct proportion to the range of mechanical alternatives available – and may also betoken an obfuscation of privilege and a nostalgia for earlier modes of journeying. Just as deceleration can undeniably trigger heightened sensory awareness of the multiple textures of place, microtravel itself is often also to be associated with an attention to detail otherwise missed from mechanized journeys or denied to those reliant on the acceleration of the body through space. This can entail looking more closely, in processes dubbed ‘microspection’, but, in a further caveat, there is a clear need to be cautious about the potential ocularcentrism of that cognate term. As Mary Louise Pratt demonstrated in Imperial Eyes, the privileging of the gaze can operate as a form of colonial power. Asserting the right to look – panoramically or unimpeded – may preface an assumed right to appropriate and control. Also, this emphasis on the gaze implies a downgrading of other senses, according to a Western sensory hierarchy that has traditionally situated sight above hearing, touch, taste and smell. A challenge to the Eurocentrism of such assumptions is particularly apparent in a context of growing decolonization of the senses. Boaventura de Sousa Santos outlines in The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South, for instance, modes of deep seeing, deep listening and deep tasting common outside Western cultures.

Racialized human faces, made with black and brown hides of various hues, shaved and stitched together with bright shiny silver pins, are affixed to the bodies of lions, antelopes, sheep, bears, and coyotes, among other animals. These hybrid taxidermy sculptures by Kate Clark, with their human faces and animal bodies, not only nuzzle the thin fuzzy line between species, bringing the human and the animal into intimate proximity but also breathlessly speak to the historical associations between blackness and animalization. Black American poet Claudia Rankine specially commissioned a taxidermy sculpture by Clark to be photographed and included within her Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), a book-length poem about race and anti-black racism and microaggressions in contemporary America. Donning a taxidermy mask (made by Clark), black hip-hop artist Desiigner transforms into a half-man-half-panda in the music video's final scene for “Panda” (2016). And, in the black horror film Get Out (2017), taxidermy exists in a strange constellation with the main protagonist, Chris Washington, a black man who ultimately weaponizes a taxidermy mount to escape from a veritable house of horrors. Taken together, these examples suggest that taxidermy is enjoying something of a black renaissance. As this chapter will argue, taxidermy is emerging as a constellation that cuts across genres to capture the pervasive horror of black existence.

As the first part of this chapter explores, the long nineteenth century sets the stage for a difficult relation between taxidermy and black bodies. From the nearly forgotten black taxidermist John Edmonstone, who trained Charles Darwin, through the real-life cases of preserved and taxidermied black bodies (of the “Hottentot Venus” and “El Negro”), likely inspiration for the stuffed black man-turned-coatrack in H. G. Wells's Gothic tale “The Triumphs of a Taxidermist” (1894), black bodies have inhabited the world of taxidermy since its golden age—a golden age it shares with the Gothic. And yet now, in our contemporary moment, taxidermy's black bodies have returned to Gothic horror with a vengeance. In the next two parts of this chapter, I focus on two key texts where taxidermy constellates the horror of black existence: Claudia Rankine's genre-bending prose poetry collection Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), which includes a photograph of a specially commissioned taxidermy sculpture by Kate Clark, and the horror film Get Out (2017, dir. Jordan Peele).

The field of migration studies has sometimes been accused of remaining separate from other fields of study in contemporary social sciences, such as globalization, technological innovation, geographical mobility, and the advent of new tools and practices of long-distance communication. In turn, migration scholars complain that their research is little known or valorized outside their field of specialization.

Moreover, knowledge about East Asia, despite its growing prominence in the economic and political landscape of the contemporary world, remains limited and superficial in the western hemisphere. In addition, the current geopolitical tensions seem to reinforce the perception of an ‘other’, distant, impenetrable and hostile world.

By contrast, this book has the remarkable merit of providing a contribution that addresses these issues. It covers mobility and communication, new technologies, digital platforms and e-commerce, transnational entrepreneurship and political mobilizations across borders, families and gender issues, globalized labour and transnational migration. Throughout, it closely examines the social transformations in East Asia and provides information on phenomena hitherto largely neglected by academic and public debate.

In the field investigations discussed by the various chapters, the authors call into question established concepts in the globalization debate, such as that of spatio-temporal compression introduced by David Harvey at the end of the 1980s (Harvey 1989); that of mobility, linked above all to John Urry (2007); and that of diaspora, which refers to multiple historical and geographical contexts (Cohen 2008). In addition, a series of themes linked to the development of digitalization and virtual connections are studied in their economic and social context-specific applications. Of no less importance is the analysis of the links between exchanges that take place in the virtual space and the processes that take place in the real spaces of the contemporary world, as in the case of political mobilization. The chapters in this book therefore demonstrate a theoretical awareness and a conceptual breadth that enable them to capture the interest of a range of readers beyond devotees of migration studies.

When analysing migratory phenomena, an important aspect emerges from the various studies in the volume: the diversity of migrants. International migration is generally perceived and thematized as a form of ‘problematic mobility’ (Anderson 2017), that is, in essence, as movements of poor populations across borders.

Sound is sufficiently prominent in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the text ringing with church bells, doorbells and footsteps, that early readers such as Jean Cocteau wrote of hearing the work rather than reading it. Listening has often been a way for literature to discuss limits. As Angela Leighton notes, ‘Both the ear's limitation, and the unnerving reach and ubiquity of sound, are facts explored by literature's own awareness of the written word's mixed silence and audibility’. Where, as often in Proust, the physical body is immobile or contained, the ‘reach’ of sound comes to hold a special ability both to define a space and to traverse its visual boundaries.

As Margaret Topping notes, Proust's narrator ‘undertakes journeys of proximity […] disentangling the notion of travel from that of physical mobility’, exemplifying Jean-Didier Urbain's ‘endotic’, or vertical, travel. Ideas of vertical travel have often exhibited, as Charles Forsdick has shown, a desire ‘to disrupt the connection between horizontalism and ocularcentrism, and to suggest that the microspection it entails is a multisensory practice’. Among the many twentieth-century writers calling for an end to tired notions of the exotic informed by the primacy of horizontal exploration of new geographies, Victor Segalen, writing contemporaneously to Proust in his ‘Essay on Exoticism’, speaks of the need to ‘[s]trip Exoticism of its “geographic” component’, focusing instead on ‘[t]he love of other worlds, the world of sound, for example’. Sound plays a crucial role in Proust's geography of space and time, as horizontal travel is overtaken by the role of memory, offering journeys through past time. As conventional journeying across physical space is interrupted by the imposition of limits on the travelling body, new opportu-nities arise for the travelling mind. In this chapter, I would like to focus on how Proust simultaneously exploits three alternatives to conventional travel, with the audible rivalling the visual, the vertical taking precedence over the horizontal, and time conquering space.