Abstract
Through a study of early French romances, especially the Conte de Floire et Blancheflor and Alexandre de Paris’s Roman d’Alexandre, this essay offers a new approach to the automaton in medieval literature. Bruno Latour’s plural ontology, which elaborates on the earlier work of Gilbert Simondon and Étienne Souriau, provides a way to break down the division between the human mind and the world (and hence the mind and the machine), offering a rich understanding of the way in which the beings of technology [TEC], fiction [FIC], and religion [REL] act in concert upon us to inspire our desire for technological fictions.
Copyright © 2020 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York
2020
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