Contemporary Cyborgs and Androids and Their Pre-Modern Antecedents--NeMLA 2027 Panel
“Did I request thee, Maker?”: Contemporary Cyborgs and Androids and Their Pre-Modern Antecedents
Contemporary speculative fiction is saturated with androids, cyborgs, artificial intelligences, and technologically engineered forms of sentience. Yet the fantasy of constructed or quasi-human life long predates modern computing and robotics. Classical and pre-modern literature repeatedly imagines artificial beings, animated matter, virtual persons, mechanical servants, enchanted automata, and forms of life that blur the boundary between the human and the non-human. This panel invites papers that place contemporary representations of manufactured or technologically mediated beings in dialogue with their classical or pre-modern antecedents. Possible pairings might include science fiction, film, television, comics, anime, or video games alongside texts from antiquity through the early modern period. What conceptual, philosophical, theological, or aesthetic frameworks for artificial life emerge in pre-modern literature? How do earlier traditions of animation, embodiment, enchantment, or mechanical simulation anticipate contemporary debates surrounding AI, consciousness, labor, gender, race, affect, or personhood?
While Frankenstein remains a central touchstone for discussions of artificial life—and itself invokes Paradise Lost as part of that genealogy—this panel is especially interested in less frequently discussed genealogies and archives. What ancestors to the android or cyborg might be found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the works of Shakespeare, medieval romance, alchemical traditions, Jewish mysticism, Islamic philosophy, Buddhist narrative traditions, or other non-Western pre-modern texts? Possible topics may include automata and animated objects; artificial or manufactured bodies; alchemy, magic, and technological imagination; pre-modern theories of mind, soul, and consciousness; race, gender, and constructed embodiment; virtuality, simulation, and illusion; labor and mechanical life; monstrosity and the posthuman; game studies and worldbuilding; and theological or philosophical anxieties surrounding creation itself.