Why do we find artificial people fascinating Drawing from a rich fictional and cinematic tradition Anatomy of a Robot explores the political and textual implications of our perennial projections of humanity onto figures such as robots androids cyborgs and automata In an engaging sophisticated and accessible presentation Despina Kakoudaki argues that in their narrative and cultural deployment artificial people demarcate what it means to be human They perform this function by offering us a non human version of ourselves as a site of investigation Artificial people teach us that being human being a person or a self is a constant process and often a matter of legal philosophical and political struggle By analyzing a wide range of literary texts and films including episodes from Twilight Zone the fiction of Philip K Dick Kazuo Ishiguro s novel Never Let Me Go Metropolis The Golem Frankenstein The Terminator Iron Man Blade Runner and I Robot and going back to alchemy and to Aristotle s Physics and De Anima she tracks four foundational narrative elements in this centuries old discourse the fantasy of the artificial birth the fantasy of the mechanical body the tendency to represent artificial people as slaves and the interpretation of artificiality as an existential trope What unifies these investigations is the return of all four elements to the question of what constitutes the human This focused approach to the topic of the artificial constructed or mechanical person allows us to reconsider the creation of artificial life By focusing on their historical provenance and textual versatility Kakoudaki elucidates artificial people s main cultural function which is the political and existential negotiation of what it means to be a person