The following text field will produce suggestions that follow it as you type.

Loading Inventory...

Barnes and Noble

Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work Artificial People

Current price: $38.95
Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work Artificial People
Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work Artificial People

Barnes and Noble

Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work Artificial People

Current price: $38.95
Loading Inventory...

Size: Paperback

Visit retailer's website
*Product Information may vary - to confirm product availability, pricing, and additional information please contact Barnes and Noble
Why do we find artificial people fascinating? Drawing from a rich fictional and cinematic tradition, 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 , the fiction of Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel ), and going back to alchemy and to Aristotle’s and , 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.

More About Barnes and Noble at MarketFair Shoppes

Barnes & Noble does business -- big business -- by the book. As the #1 bookseller in the US, it operates about 720 Barnes & Noble superstores (selling books, music, movies, and gifts) throughout all 50 US states and Washington, DC. The stores are typically 10,000 to 60,000 sq. ft. and stock between 60,000 and 200,000 book titles. Many of its locations contain Starbucks cafes, as well as music departments that carry more than 30,000 titles.

Powered by Adeptmind