The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture by Foster, Kate; Crozier, Molly;

Short description:

This book argues that thought experiments in literature demonstrate how fears and hopes around automation may have more basis in imagination than reality. The volume asks how these understandings of automation can help to understand our technological present, and our increasingly technologized future.

Long description:

Automation is everywhere: in the supermarket, in home appliances, and on our commutes. While we worry about what automation means for human autonomy now, human societies have long wondered about their replacement by machines. The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture explores the pervasive – and long-standing – influence of automation on humanity by dismantling the prevalent future-oriented perspective of many automation debates. This collection examines how literature has conceptualized automation over centuries, from utopian visions of a world liberated from work and domestic labour to dystopian futures in which humans are surplus to requirements. We set out social and industrial developments which feed into discourses of automation and its mediation in literary cultures. By bringing together theoretical approaches to real-world automation with readings of its literary interpretations, this volume demonstrates literature’s role as a space for hypothesizing alternate realities, making clear literature’s propensity to inform our attitudes to real-world phenomena.

The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture highlights relationships between human agency and automation in literary imaginations. Its investigation of poetics and poetic production offers fresh insight into the value of the unruly and alive humanity that exists beyond the battery of the machines propelling us toward futurity.

 -Saba Syed Razvi, Associate Professor English and Creative Writing, University of Houston-Victoria, USA

Table of Contents:

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction. Automation: This Time It’s (Probably Not) Different

Kate Foster

1.‘What we need is more automation’: Automation Debates in the Postwar Period

Ben Roberts

2. When the Clock Took the Floor: Technology as Non-Human Actor in Augusto De Angelis’ Detective Novel Il Banchiere Assassinato (1935)

Emanuele Stefanori

3. On the Threshold of Life and Death: Guido Cavalcanti and the Medieval Automaton

Rebecca Reilly

4. Monsters, Mechanics, and Automatic Writing in E.T.A. Hoffman’s ‘The Sandman’ and Gérard de Nerval’s ‘Aurélia’

Vanessa Weller

5. Forms of Computation in Hjalmar Söderberg’s and Thomas Mann’s Decadent Short Stories

Laura Alice Chapot

6. Prosthetic Verse: Technology, Embodiment, and Disability in French Poetry (1984-2024)

Léon Pradeau

7. Postcolonial Agency vs. ‘French Automation’ in Mounsi’s Territoire d’Outre-Ville

David Spieser-Landes

8. Humans in the Loop as Post-Literary Ghosts: Discomfort and Disruption on Amazon Mechanical Turk

Bruno Ministro

9. Bricolage, Wild Thought, and the Automation of Knowledge

Madeleine Chalmers

Coda

Molly Crozier

Index