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“Goethe, Faust, And Motherless Creations.” Goethe Yearbook 23 (2016): 59-75., Wendy Nielsen

Department of English Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

“Goethe, Faust, and Motherless Creations” reads the life and work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe alongside the material culture of motherless creations, the automata, androids, and golems that his contemporaries imagined and created. Automata and androids are motherless in the sense that men create them, and they represent an attempt to usurp women’s primary role in reproduction. The manufacture of automata and androids and the pursuit of natural philosophy put male inventors and scientists in reproductive roles, for they sought to overturn the boundary between life and death. Examining Goethe’s relationship to the artificial life forms of his period …