Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.41 (745 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0674049357 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 386 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-01-18 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Thoughtful and rich FlyingSnail This is a topic I've researched in a casual fashion for years, and I was glad to hear of a new book on the topic. Based on the title, I expected either a mushy-headed sociology/psychology thesis, or the 'Ripley's''-style roll call of the more flamboyant examples that other books present. So, I didn't buy the book; I got it fr. "Great Book, But Don't Buy for the Kindle!" according to Maggie Delgado. OK, I'm only a quarter of the way through the book, so I can't be certain that it is all as interesting and informative as the first couple of chapters.**********************************BUT THE KINDLE EDITION HAS NO IMAGES!! NO GRAPHS, AND ONLY SOME OF THE CHARTS. Which really does limit the book's usefulness.****************. Talking Heads, Squating Ducks, Chessplaying Turks, and Robot Revolts, Oh My! Daron Picking up a history of automata, one expects to find a historical narrative of machine men evolving over the centuries into the car assembling and hand shaking robots of today. In Kang's narrative, the physical devices are perhaps the least important part of the story. Kang doesn't dwell on what the talking head said or what
From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automatonbetter known today as the robothas captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity.Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes w
Louis. Minsoo Kang is Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri–St.
In this broadly synthetic work of outstanding acuity, Kang takes the reader on a fascinating journey through various episodes in European intellectual history, from ancient Greek, medieval, and Renaissance magic and mechanics, early modern mechanistic philosophy and mechanical, vitalist, and early Romantic revolts against mechanized humanity, 19th-century fantastic literature and protests against the industrial age, all the way down to the figure of the robot in early twentieth century theater and film or more recent narratives of robotic and cybernetic futures in film and science fiction. (Joan Landes, Pennsylvania State University)Sublime Dreams of Living Machines argues effectively that the automaton is both a central idea and a conceptual tool in the Western imagination. Kang's work is dis