Motor Eyes.

[Dave Monroe]

Okay, thought I'd heard La Mettrie mentioned here. 
Have only really just flipped through this, largely on
his medical writings, but I'll see if I can dig it out
and report back ...

Wellmann, Kathleen Anne.  La Mettrie: Medicine,
   Philosophy, and Enlightenment.  Durham, NC:
   Duke UP, 1992.

And definitely see also ...

Vartanian, Aram.  La Mettrie's L'homme machine:
   A Study in the Origins of an Idea.  Princeton,
   NJ: Princeton UP, 1960.

There are a few English translations of JODLM's
L'Homme Machine.  The Open Court one, as I recall,
comes with the French as well, there's a more recent
Cambridge UP ed., and the Hackett comes with Man a
Plant as well.

All of the above save the Vartanian are readily
available remaindered and/or used, I see 'em regularly
at places like Powells' and Half-Price Books.  La
Mettrie is definitely a must in the history of
automata.  Which reminds me, also received at long
last my very own copy of ...

Villiers de L'Isle-Adam.  Tomorrow's Eve.
   Trans. Robert Martin Adams.  Urbana: U of
   Illinois P, 2001 [1982 (1886)].

... in which Thomas Edison (as fictionalized by
Villiers during TAE's own lifetime) constructs a
female automaton.  Also included in its entirety (as
The Future Eve) in ...

Hustvedt, Asti, ed.  The Decadent Reader:
   Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from
   Fin-de-Siecle France.  New York: Zone, 1998.

... and see thereupon ...

Lathers, Marie.  The Aesthetics of Artifice:
   Villiers' Future Eve.  Chapel Hill: U of North
   Carolina P, 1996.

Michelson, Annette.  "On the Eve of the Future:
   The Reasonable Facsimile and the Philosophical
   Toy,” October 29 (Summer 1984): 3-21

Miller Frank, Felicia.  The Mechanical Song:
   Women, Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth
   Century French Narrative.  Stanford, CA:
   Stanford UP, 1995.

Again, a nice bibliography at, of all places ...

http://campuscgi.princeton.edu/~scg/dept/ger/520/syl.s00.shtml

It occurs to me that I've never stopped researching
Pynchon ...

--- jporter <jp3214 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> > From: "John Bailey" <johnbonbailey at hotmail.com>
> 
> > 
> > And, not surprisingly, it was shortly thereafter
> that "The Golden Age of
> > Automata" came into being, in France and
> thereabouts.
> > 
> > We can also level a quivering finger at Julien
> Offray de la Mettrie, who,
> > following Descartes, tried to expand the Metaphor
> of Man the Machine in his
> > saggy-bottomed tract of the same title, though I
> prefer to translate it as
> > "Machine Man!" (exclamation mark added), which
> difuses some of the heavy
> > handed seriousness of its polemic...He later wrote
> a companion piece, Man
> > the Plant, not a guidebook to nuclear power
> management, but a diatribe on
> > "our" place as vegetable matter.
> > 
> > La Mettrie's work was very popular, and is still
> reprinted today. It's also
> > a prime example of the way new vogues in
> technology (ie. automata) bleed
> > into far more important issues, such as the very
> way we conceive of our
> > subjectivity. When we get to SHOCK and SHROUD, we
> will be duly informed of
> > one of the more insidious ways this very process
> has occurred: in the 18th
> > Century, man conceived of himself as a clockwork
> machine...later, as new
> > "discoveries" asserted themselves, we became
> bundles of heat, conduits of
> > energy, what next? Look around, folks. Since V.
> was published, we've been
> > meat computers, quantum flesh mutations, what've
> you got?
> > 
> > Technology and spirituality are not two important
> themes in Pynchon, they're
> > one.
> > 
> 
> Yes, yes- me too. Leaning far enough into the wind
> tonight, I too can smell
> those Frenchies... detente off the starboard bow,
> spelled: S C I E N C E.
> 
> The third person singular has its uses after all.
> Somewhere between
> Auschwitz and Los Alamos, the new technicians of the
> sacred are busy
> refining their craft.
> 
> Perhaps working from the inspiration of some
> half-remembered tale heard at
> the feet of the third man- the civil engineer who
> made it back with Hugh and
> Pike-Leeming, and then discreetly disappeared- some
> grandson or
> granddaughter is busy tonight.
> 
> What's next?
> 
> jody
> 


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