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What’s a Little Monotony?
Hay, Jonathan
Hay, Jonathan
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The Mundane Foundation of Isaac Asimov’s Robot Stories
Abstract
As this article demonstrates, the characteristic focus within Asimov scholarship exclusively upon the technological aspects of his robot stories and novels has meant that the importance of their mundane components have been systematically overlooked. By shifting critical focus to the mundane aspects of these works, it becomes newly apparent that Asimov uses a mundane foundation to problematise humanistic constructs of the human. These mundane components comprise an essential cognitive foundation of known phenomena, via which the comprehension of Asimov’s profoundly novel robots becomes plausible contextually. By readily anticipating and demonstrating the phenomenological impact of the everyday positionality of technology in the contemporary world, Asimov’s robot stories and novels recode the outdated signifier of the ‘human’ in a posthumanistic paradigm.
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Hay, J. (2020). What’s a Little Monotony?: The Mundane Foundation of Isaac Asimov’s Robot Stories. Hélice: Critical Thinking on Speculative Fiction, 28(1), 52 - 71.
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Hélice
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Hélice: Critical Thinking on Speculative Fiction
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Article