Sublime Dreams of Living Machines : The Automaton in the European Imagination / Minsoo Kang.
2011
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Title
Sublime Dreams of Living Machines : The Automaton in the European Imagination / Minsoo Kang.
Author
Kang, Minsoo, author.
ISBN
9780674059412
Published
Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2011]
Copyright
©2011
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (386 p.)
Item Number
10.4159/9780674059412 doi
Dewey Decimal Classification
629.8/92094
Summary
Kang's central contention is that the automaton, a machine that can move by itself (better known today as the robot), is one of the essential ideas with which people in the West have pondered the very nature of humanity itself. In Kang's telling, automata are mirrors of the ideas, fears, and anxieties of a given era, in that attitudes towards the machines have always been indicative of a moment's zeitgeist. The book is historically sweeping, but not comprehensive; the focus is on what Kang takes to be key changes in the representations of and responses to automata. His main interest is on how Europeans in different periods of the past thought about the very notion of a self-moving machine that acted as if it were alive and how they used it for various symbolic and intellectual purposes.
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Access limited to authorized users.
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Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 01. Dez 2022)
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Table of Contents
Frontmatter
Contents
Illustrations
Introduction
1 The Power of the Automaton
2 Between Magic and Mechanics: The Automaton in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
3 The Man-machine in the World-machine, 1637-1748
4 From the Man-machine to the Automaton-man, 1748-1793
5 The Uncanny Automaton, 1789-1833
6 The Living Machines of the Industrial Age, 1833-1914
7 The Revolt of the Robots, 1914-1935
Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Contents
Illustrations
Introduction
1 The Power of the Automaton
2 Between Magic and Mechanics: The Automaton in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
3 The Man-machine in the World-machine, 1637-1748
4 From the Man-machine to the Automaton-man, 1748-1793
5 The Uncanny Automaton, 1789-1833
6 The Living Machines of the Industrial Age, 1833-1914
7 The Revolt of the Robots, 1914-1935
Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index