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Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton
Literary Theory/Cultural StudiesExplores literary theory's fear of and fascination with the mechanical.Anxieties about fixing the absolute difference between the human being and the mechanical replica of the human being, the automaton, are as old as the first appearance of the machine itself. Exploring these anxieties and the efforts they prompted, this book opens a window on one of the most significant, if subtle, ideological battles waged on behalf of the human against the machine since the Enlightenment-one that continues in the wake of technological and conceptual progress today.A sustained examination of the automaton as early modern machine and as a curious ancestor of the twentieth-century robot, Copying Machines offers extended readings of mechanistic images in the eighteenth century through the prism of twentieth-century commentary. In readings of texts by Lafayette, Molire, Laclos, and La Bruyre-and in a chapter on the eighteenth-century inventor of automatons, Jacques Vaucanson-Catherine Liu provides a fascinating account of ways in which figures of the automaton and of the preindustrial machine haunt the imagination of ancien rgime France and structure key moments of the canonical literature and criticism of the period.Catherine Liu is assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota.Translation University of Minnesota Press
224 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2000
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About the author
Catherine Liu
25Ìýbooks120ÌýfollowersCatherine Liu is the director of the University of California Irvine’s Humanities Center, a professor in Film and Media Studies, and the coeditor of The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century Down the Royal Road. She is the author of Oriental Girls Desire Romance (a novel), Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton, and American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique.
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