Review Anatomy of a Robot

Anatomy of a Robot High quality books

Anatomy of a Robot
By:Despina Kakoudaki
Published on 2014-07-07 by Rutgers University Press

Why do we find artificial people fascinating? Drawing from a rich fictional and cinematic tradition, Anatomy of a Robot explores the political and textual implications of our perennial projections of humanity onto figures such as robots, androids, cyborgs, and automata. In an engaging, sophisticated, and accessible presentation, Despina Kakoudaki argues that, in their narrative and cultural deployment, artificial people demarcate what it means to be human. They perform this function by offering us a non-human version of ourselves as a site of investigation. Artificial people teach us that being human, being a person or a self, is a constant process and often a matter of legal, philosophical, and political struggle. By analyzing a wide range of literary texts and films (including episodes from Twilight Zone, the fiction of Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, Metropolis, The Golem, Frankenstein, The Terminator, Iron Man, Blade Runner, and I, Robot), and going back to alchemy and to Aristotle’s Physics and De Anima, she tracks four foundational narrative elements in this centuries-old discourse— the fantasy of the artificial birth, the fantasy of the mechanical body, the tendency to represent artificial people as slaves, and the interpretation of artificiality as an existential trope. What unifies these investigations is the return of all four elements to the question of what constitutes the human. This focused approach to the topic of the artificial, constructed, or mechanical person allows us to reconsider the creation of artificial life. By focusing on their historical provenance and textual versatility, Kakoudaki elucidates artificial people’s main cultural function, which is the political and existential negotiation of what it means to be a person.

This Book was ranked at 13 by Google Books for keyword Lewis Mumford.

Book ID of Anatomy of a Robot's Books is DaVvBAAAQBAJ, Book which was written byDespina Kakoudakihave ETAG "OXVhyGU0LOg"

Book which was published by Rutgers University Press since 2014-07-07 have ISBNs, ISBN 13 Code is 9780813572765 and ISBN 10 Code is 0813572762

Reading Mode in Text Status is true and Reading Mode in Image Status is true

Book which have "272 Pages" is Printed at BOOK under CategoryLiterary Criticism

This Book was rated by Raters and have average rate at ""

This eBook Maturity (Adult Book) status is NOT_MATURE

Book was written in en

eBook Version Availability Status at PDF is true and in ePub is true

Book Preview

Comments