Information about the author:
Andrey V. Golubkov
Andrey V. Golubkov, DSc in Philology, Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Leading Research Fellow, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia; National Research university “Higher School of Economics”, Pokrovskiy Bd., 11, 109028 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7069-1033
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Abstract:
The article is an introduction to the collective monograph which was conceived as a selection of papers from the international conference “Dolls, Automata, Robots: An Artificial Body in the World of Intellectual and Artistic Culture (to the 200th Anniversary of the Publication of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus”)” held on December 5–7, 2018 at the Gorky Institute of World Literature (Russian Academy of Sciences) and the HSE University (Moscow, Russia). The article aims at comprehending the artificial body status in world culture, both artistic and scientific, across different geographical areas from antiquity to the present day: the paradoxical demand for and resilience of this phenomenon in different cultures; the motifs and themes it has generated; and the psychological, ontological, aesthetic and ethical rationales behind this topos, as embodied in artistic representations (in literature, painting, sculpture and cinema) of the artificial human and/or animal body, that stem from the scientific discourse. The article also describes the structure of the monograph: 29 collected papers are divided into four chapters: “Statues / Dolls: Passion and the Sacred”, “Androids / Machines: Between Myth and Science”, “Robots / Automata: Will and Violence”, “Cyborgs / Avatars: Augmented and Decorated Body”. The papers explore a variety of cultures from East (Japan, Korea) to West (the USA) including Africa, Russia, Western and Eastern Europe.