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Full-Text Articles in Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory
Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift
Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift
Publications and Research
In the Middle Ages, articulating religious figures like wooden Deposition crucifixes and ambulatory saints were tools for devotion, techno-mythological objects that distilled the wonders of engineering and holiness. Robots are gestures toward immortality, created in the face of the undeniable fact and experience of the ongoing decay of our fleshy bodies. Both like and unlike human beings, robots and androids occupy a nebulous perceptual realm between life and death, animation and inanimation. Masahiro Mori called this in-between space the “uncanny valley.” In this essay I argue that unlike a modern person apprehending an android (the uncanny human-like object that resides …
A Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, And Tears, Christopher B. Swift
A Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, And Tears, Christopher B. Swift
Publications and Research
This essay draws upon a poetic and devotional texts from late medieval Spain to show how public displays of emotion (weeping, in particular) during penitential processions could be learned and prepared for in advance.