From Descartes’ mechanistic
vision of the world to Zola’s coal-mines, from the plates of the Encyclopédie
to the uncanny automata of the Romantic period, from the printing-press to the
present-day machinery of textuality, we are a culture obsessed with—and
possessed by—machines. The nexus that binds humans and machines together has
never been more pronounced than it is now, in the age of cyberspace and
robotics, when bodies acquire prostheses and machines are endowed with
artificial intelligence.
As we advance into the new
millennium, a re-examination of our relation to machines becomes an important
task, in light of trends such as the explosion of the internet, and
developments in contemporary theory. The spaces and social frameworks
surrounding us—cultures, networks, cities, ecosystems, bodies—that can be
thought of as machines are constantly multiplying. How can we think the
machine, in an age of thinking machines? Does the cultural prehistory of its
successive images help shed any light on its contemporary role?
We welcome interdisciplinary
contributions that explore the history of our images and fictions of the
machine—in art, literature and culture, from the era of medieval warfare to the
modern landscapes of cyborgs. Papers engaging with French cultural texts are
especially encouraged. Topics include, but are not limited to:
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Please send all questions and abstracts for papers (not to exceed twenty minutes) to [email protected] by January 15, 2001. Abstracts can also be submitted by regular mail to: French Graduate Student Union, Department of French and Romance Philology, MC 4906, Columbia University, 1150 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027. Tel.: (212) 854-2500, fax: (212) 854-5863.