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Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People by Despina Kakoudaki (Hardcover, 2014)

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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 analysing 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.

Product Identifiers

Publisher
Rutgers University Press
ISBN-13
9780813562162
eBay Product ID (ePID)
208844961

Product Key Features

Book Title
Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People
Author
Despina Kakoudaki
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Topic
Literature
Publication Year
2014
Number of Pages
288 Pages

Dimensions

Item Height
229mm
Item Width
152mm

Additional Product Features

Title_Author
Despina Kakoudaki
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States

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Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People by Despina Kakoudaki (Hardcover, 2014)

About this product

Product Information

Product Identifiers

Product Key Features

Dimensions

Additional Product Features

Best Selling in Books

The Concise 48 Laws Of Power by Robert Greene (Paperback, 2002)

The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery by Brianna Wiest (Paperback, 2020)

Atomic Habits: the life-changing million-copy #1 bestseller by James Clear (Paperback, 2018)

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (Paperback, 2000)

First Day by Andrew Daddo (Paperback, 2014)

Save on Books

Orthodox Study Bible: Ancient Christianity Speaks to Today's World

NEW Bluey: My Mum is the Best By Bluey (Hardcover) Picture Book FREE Shipping

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