Stock image for illustration purposes only - book cover, edition or condition may vary.
Copying Machines
Catherine Liu
€ 34.39
FREE Delivery in Ireland
Description for Copying Machines
Paperback. Num Pages: 240 pages. BIC Classification: 3JF; 3JJ; DSA; JFC. Category: (G) General (US: Trade); (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 228 x 149 x 12. Weight in Grams: 320.
Explores literary theory’s fear of and fascination with the mechanical.
Anxieties about fixing the absolute difference between the human being and the mechanical replica, 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, MoliÈre, Laclos, and La BruyÈre-and in a chapter on the eighteenth-century inventor of automatons, Jacques Vaucanson-Catherine Liu provides a fascinating account of ways in which the automaton and the preindustrial machine haunt the imagination of ancien rÉgime France and structure key moments of the canonical literature and criticism of the period.Product Details
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2000
Publisher
University of Minnesota Press United States
Number of pages
240
Condition
New
Number of Pages
240
Place of Publication
Minnesota, United States
ISBN
9780816635030
SKU
V9780816635030
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15
About Catherine Liu
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.
Reviews for Copying Machines