The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture Cultures of Automation

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: 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 C. 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

Biography

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.

"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


"The range – from medieval Florence and early-modern automata to decadent fiction, twentieth-century detective novels, contemporary poetry and platform labour – is impressive, and the essays are consistently attentive to how specific media forms (the telegraph, photography, digital platforms, LLMs) reconfigure what counts as ‘automatic’. The repeated invocation of historical examples of moral panic – lamplighters striking against electric light in 1907, telegrams allegedly destroying depth of thought in 1858 – productively relativises present-day fears around AI, even as Foster and others acknowledge that ‘this time’ may be different in terms of scale and speed."

Read "Foster, Kate and Crozier, Molly (eds), The Human and the Machine in Literature and Culture: Cultures of Automation" published by The British Society for Literature and Science.