MINSOO KANG. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination.

Abstract

Few academic authors boast the distinction of having won a prize for fantasy and horror fiction, and Minsoo Kang is unusual in bringing to the study of history the expertise of both a popular writer and a professional literary scholar. In his second non-fiction book, Kang explores how the meaning and fascination of automata have changed over time. Although he does describe technological aspects of such machines, he is mainly concerned with the more interesting endeavor of examining their emotional and intellectual implications. Automata are simultaneously captivating and disturbing, transcending boundaries between life and death, between the natural and the artificial, and so provoking mixed yet powerful responses. Kang aims, he writes, to launch a history of the imagination that will focus not on what happened, but on what people have fantasized about. In this first foray, Kang starts with Homer and Hero, thus making it immediately apparent that his is an ambitious project. Very sensibly, he has drawn limits around it. Despite his personal interest in East Asian history, Kang restricts himself geographically to Europe, and pauses only briefly in the classical world before leaping forward to medieval times and finally coming to a halt in the interwar period shortly after Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). As Kang points out, to continue into the second and digitized half of the twentieth century would demand a separate volume and a shift toward the United States. He has organized his material chronologically and repeatedly emphasizes how crucial it is to consider an automaton's significance within its historical time-frame. Alert to the pitfalls inherent in this type of longitudinal study, he reprimands previous authors for wrongly conflating the conceptual understanding manifested in one period with the archetypal meaning of a symbol.