Human machines/machine people in literature – University of Innsbruck
An anthology on the subject of artificially created (living) beings published at the Institute for Comparative Literature examines “Golems, robots, androids and cyborgs as the third sex” from a discourse-analytical and gender-perspective perspective – the subtitle of the work with contributions from master’s students – in selected literary Works from antiquity to the present.
Artificially created (living) beings that are neither human nor machine, neither man nor woman, neither organism nor dead matter have been at work in our imagination for thousands of years. Aristotle already lamented this in his main work politics (4th century BC) that it does not (yet) indicate any human-like machines that could take over the tasks of slaves and thus revolutionize social life. The world of science fiction and fantasy literature is also teeming with homunculi, golems, robots, androids and cyborgs. In the exercise “Human machines/machine people in literature: Golems, robots, androids and cyborgs as the third gender” held by Dunja Brötz at the Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck in the winter semesters 2020/21 and 2021/22, numerous of these literary figures were presented examined by students of the Master’s program “Comparative Literature” from a discourse-analytical and gender-theoretical perspective. This anthology summarizes some of these innovative analyses, the chronological arc of which extends from antiquity to the present, and literary highlights of human machines or machine people in texts by Ovid, ETA Hoffmann, Gustav Meyrink, Marge Piercy, Andreas Eschbach, Walter Moers, Angelika Meier, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martina Clavadetscher and Raphaela Edelbauer throws.
information about the book
Human machines / machine people in literature
Golems, robots, androids and cyborgs as the third gender
Dunja Brötz et al. (Ed.)
ISBN 978-3-99106-087-1
Paperback, 222 pages
2022, Innsbruck University Press • iup
Price: 29.90 euros