The Robot: Utopia, Science-Fiction or a Conservative Reaction to the "New Man" of the Machine Age?
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| Year of publication | 2011 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Karel Čapeks play R.U.R., Rossums Universal Robots was written in a period in which the modern society realized its modernity and fully identified itself as modern. It is the period of both of the coming dominance of machines in allimportant areas of Euro-American society and culture, and also the period of the emerging special sensibility that spread over the twentieth century. This fact gave the name to the whole period, which stretches roughly from World War I to the start of World War II – the period of the so called Machine Age. Cecelia Tichi notes how, by the turn of the century, popular culture and serious literature alike had already begun to reflect a whole new Machine Age sensibility, particularly through the pervasive use of machine metaphors, even in the least likely places, such as description of natural phenomena. The central aim of this contribution is to illustrate the development of the machine metaphor, esp. by showing the relevance, and the contribution of the robots to this matter. |
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