Abstract
Androids — robots that look like humans — serve as central characters in movies and television all the way back to the origins of those forms. In movies, they primarily have two values: they are mostly symbols of technological threat — the dangers of industrialism, in earlier movies, and the dangers of human ingenuity and automated slave labour in later ones — or they are, less often, symbols of how we contemplate the meaning of ‘human’, the issues connected with ‘personhood’. Androids depicted in television shows have a more varied symbolic value, mainly because the writers have the time and need to develop various plotlines. So, in a television series, the signification of the android can vary depending upon the episode we view.
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© 2015 Kevin LaGrandeur
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LaGrandeur, K. (2015). Androids and the Posthuman in Television and Film. In: Hauskeller, M., Philbeck, T.D., Carbonell, C.D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137430328_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137430328_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57701-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-43032-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)