The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture

Cultures of Automation

Kate Foster, Molly Crozier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040432495
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction: This Time It’s (Probably Not) Different
• 1 ‘What We Need Is More Automation’: Automation Debates in the Postwar Period
• 2 When the Clock Took the Floor: Technology as Non-Human Actor in Augusto De Angelis’ Detective Novel Il Banchiere Assassinato (1935)
• 3 On the Threshold of Life and Death: Guido Cavalcanti and the Medieval Automaton
• 4 Monsters, Mechanics and Automatic Writing in E.T.A. Hoffman’s ‘The Sandman’ and Gérard de Nerval’s ‘Aurélia’
• 5 Forms of Computation in Hjalmar Söderberg’s and Thomas Mann’s Decadent Short Stories
• 6 Prosthetic Verse: Technology, Embodiment and Disability in French Poetry (1984–2024)
• 7 Postcolonial Agency vs. ‘French Automation’ in Mounsi’s Territoire d’Outre-Ville
• 8 Humans in the Loop as Post-Literary Ghosts: Discomfort and Disruption on Amazon Mechanical Turk
• 9 Bricolage, Wild Thought and the Automation of Knowledge
• 10 Coda
• Index