The Melancholy Android : On the Psychology of Sacred Machines

__Explores the cultural significance of androids.__ The Melancholy Android is a psychological study of the impulses behind the creation of androids. Exploring three imaginative figures—the mummy, the golem, and the automaton—and their appearances in myth, religion, literature, and film, Eric G. Wilson tracks the development of android-building and examines the lure of artificial doubles untroubled by awareness of self. Drawing from the works of philosophers Ficino, Kleist, Freud, and Jung; writers Goethe, Coleridge, Shelley, and Poe; and movies such as Metropolis, The Mummy, and Blade Runner, this book not only offers a range of sites from which to analyze the relationship between mind and machine, but also considers a pressing paradoxical dilemma—loving machines we want to hate. The Melancholy Android is a psychological study of the impulses behind the creation of androids. Exploring three imaginative figures—the mummy, the golem, and the automaton—and their appearances in myth, religion, literature, and film, Eric G. Wilson tracks the development of android-building and examines the lure of artificial doubles untroubled by awareness of self. Drawing from the works of philosophers Ficino, Kleist, Freud, and Jung; writers Goethe, Coleridge, Shelley, and Poe; and movies such as Metropolis, The Mummy, and Blade Runner, this book not only offers a range of sites from which to anaylze the relationship between mind and machine, but also considers a pressing paradoxical dilemma—loving machines we want to hate. This book is a psychological study of the impulses behind the creation of androids. Exploring three imaginative figures{u2014}the mummy, the golem, and the automaton{u2014}and their appearances in myth, religion, literature, and film, Wilson tracks the development of android-building and examines the lure of artificial doubles untroubled by awareness of self. Drawing from the works of philosophers Ficino, Kleist, Freud, and Jung; writers Goethe, Coleridge, Shelley, and Poe; and movies such as Metropolis, The Mummy, and Blade Runner, this book not only offers a range of sites from which to analyze the relationship between mind and machine, but also considers a pressing paradoxical dilemma{u2014}loving machines we want to hate Annotation The Melancholy Android is a psychological study of the impulses behind the creation of androids. Exploring three imaginative figures the mummy, the golem, and the automaton and their appearances in myth, religion, literature, and film, Eric G. Wilson trac Eric G. Wilson is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University and the author of Coleridge's An Anatomy of Limbo and The Spiritual History of Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination . The melancholy android The mummy The golem The automaton Conclusion : the sadness of the somnambulist.

Explores the cultural significance of androids.