Elizabeth Hoiem: CU Ballet’s Coppélia and the World of Animated Dolls

GSLIS Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem will speak on Champaign Urbana Ballet’s Coppélia and the world of animated dolls at a "Lunchtime Lecture" hosted by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Illinois.

Like The Nutcracker, the ballet Coppélia was inspired by stories about mechanical wonders and animated dolls by nineteenth-century German author E.T.A. Hoffmann. We will explore how Hoffmann’s automaton tales compare with the Champaign Urbana Ballet’s performance of Coppélia. We will learn similar stories of humans enthralled by artificial life, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” and Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Nightingale,” and discuss the fears and fascinations that made them popular.

Across this artistic tradition, the technological creation of human beings paradoxically celebrates the limitless creativity of inventors like Dr. Coppélius, while hearkening a dystopia where humans are soulless machines controlled by forces beyond their understanding. Female automata, like those featured in Coppélia, were especially popular in literature. Borrowing from the Pygmalion myth, these stories question whether women should unnaturally transform themselves to attract a man’s love. We’ll also look at real automata from the traveling shows that inspired Hoffmann. Powered by clockwork, these dolls appeared to “think” by writing poetry, drawing pictures, speaking, and even playing chess. We’ll conclude with a brief look at some contemporary movies that resemble Coppélia, such as Hugo, Her, and Ex Machina.

Elizabeth Massa Hoiem is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Illinois. She has taught courses in children’s literature, British literature, science fiction, fantasy, and robots in literature. Hoiem's work investigates how the shifting politics of play, learning, technology, and work shape the development of children’s literature and material culture. Her current book project, The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacies in British Culture, 1760-1860, explores how reading changed during the industrial revolution. She proposes that reading became closely tied to other manual literacies. For the first time, child education incorporated reading alongside automata shows and factory machinery displays, puzzles and pop-up books, while teachers introduced hands-on experiments in the classroom.