Author Meets Critics: Eileen Hunt Botting's "Artificial Life After Frankenstein"

Session Submission Type: Virtual Author meet critics

Session Description

This session will be devoted to an author-meets-critics discussion on Eileen Hunt Botting's "Artificial Life After Frankenstein."

What are the obligations of humanity to the artificial creatures we make? And what are the corresponding rights of those creatures, whether they are learning machines or genetically modified organisms? In seeking ways to respond to these questions, so vital for our age of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, we would do well to turn to the capacious mind and imaginative genius of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). Shelley's novels Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and The Last Man (1826) precipitated a modern political strain of science fiction concerned with the ethical dilemmas that arise when we make artificial life—and make life artificial—through science, technology, and other forms of cultural change.

In Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Eileen Hunt Botting puts Shelley and several classics of modern political science fiction into dialogue with contemporary political science and philosophy, in order to challenge some of the apocalyptic fears at the fore of twenty-first-century political thought on AI and genetic engineering. Focusing on the prevailing myths that artificial forms of life will end the world, destroy nature, and extinguish love, Botting shows how Shelley modeled ways to break down and transform the meanings of apocalypse, nature, and love in the face of widespread and deep-seated fear about the power of technology and artifice to undermine the possibility of humanity, community, and life itself.

Through their explorations of these themes, Mary Shelley and authors of modern political science fiction from H. G. Wells to Nnedi Okorafor have paved the way for a techno-political philosophy of living with the artifice of humanity in all of its complexity. In Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Botting brings the insights born of Shelley's legacy to bear upon the ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century.

Expertise of author meets critics panelists:

1. Duncan Bell is an expert in modern political thought and Victorian-era science fiction, especially H.G. Wells, and its legacies for political theories and practices of imperial domination. He will speak to the question of defining the subgenre of "modern political science fiction" with Shelley's twin masterpieces, Frankenstein and The Last Man, at the fore.

2. Lori Marso is an expert in feminist political theory, especially Simone de Beauvoir, and its relationship to earlier literary traditions of women's writing, including Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft. She will speak to the relationship of Mary Shelley's thought to later works in feminist political theory, especially posthumanism and new materialisms.

3. Amy Atchison is an expert in comparative politics; women, gender and politics research; and dystopian fiction, especially the Russian tradition. She will speak to the theoretical implications of Shelley's work (and Artificial Life After Frankenstein) for contemporary political science scholarship that conceptualizes and studies resistance to democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism.

4. Shauna Shames is an expert in American politics; women, gender, and politics research; and dystopian fiction, especially that of Margaret Atwood. She will speak to the theoretical implications of Shelley's work (and Artificial Life After Frankenstein) for the question of what counts as a dystopia both in fiction and in real-world politics, and the methodological inclusion of literary dystopias in the study of real-world dystopias.

5. Davide Panagia is an expert in contemporary political theory and its treatment of issues of artificial intelligence, especially the political force of algorithms in the twenty-first century. He will speak to the relevance of Mary Shelley and Artificial Life After Frankenstein for contemporary political theories of AI.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Alison McQueen Stanford University

Presenters

• Amy L. Atchison Valparaiso University

• Duncan Bell Christ's College

• Davide Panagia UCLA

• Shauna L Shames

• Eileen M. Hunt University of Notre Dame

• Malka Older Sciences Po Paris