Entering the Simulacra World. Aesthetic and Cultural Phenomenologies in Literature, Media, and the Arts

This issue of Between aims to investigate the phenomenology of simulacra and their range of functions (conceptual, cultural, literary, aesthetic, and in the media). What is meant here by ‘simulacrum’ is any artificial creature or phantasm that imitates or replicates the outward form and/or behaviour of living beings, especially human beings. By doing so, it blurs the boundaries between life and artifice, human and non-human. As a notion, ‘simulacrum’ covers a variety of hybrid, liminal and often spectral figures populating the premodern, modern and contemporary imagination: from statues to puppets, from golems to homunculi, from automata to robots, from cyborgs to avatars and, ultimately, Artificial Intelligence. The case studies collected here lay the groundwork for an inquiry wherein literary works are assessed from both the point of view of textual analysis and in connection with the compelling relevance that the theme of simulacra has been gaining in the cultural sphere, including contemporary debates on the ‘trans-‘ and ‘posthuman’.