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.
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
Kate Foster is a Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Reading, UK. Her research focuses on intersections of human bodies and technology in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century cultures. She is working on a monograph on fictional androids and cyborgs, and developing a new project on technology, disease and cultural history. Molly Crozier is an early career researcher in French and Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on embodiment, gender and disability in twentieth-century theatre. She is working on a monograph on disability in Samuel Beckett’s drama. She holds an honorary fellowship at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool.
Reviews for The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture: Cultures of Automation
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
