The Melancholy Android: On the Psychology of Sacred Machines (Hardcover)
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.
Eric G. Wilson is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University and the author of Coleridge's Melancholia: An Anatomy of Limbo and The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination.