This course will consider robots, robotics, and artificial intelligence in literature and art, in order to explore the following questions: What distinguishes artificial intelligence from human intelligence? What distinguishes the artificially-constructed robot body from the human form? How has the increased computational power of the current age impinged (or not) upon notions of subjectivity and identity? What cultural anxieties and optimisms about mechanization play out in expressions of robotics and AI in literature and film? What, in the final analysis, distinguishes the human animal from its mechanized metallic progeny, or are we, as Andy Clark suggests in his latest book, Natural-born Cyborgs?
