LANGUAGE AS MEANING IN NIC ANSTETT’S SHORT STORY LOVE MACHINE: A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

Describing the issue of stylistic analysis in Love Machine, Nic Anstett provides a meticulous technique of drawing the storyline of the read and a list of different literary tools, which helps form the ideas of the story and the characters analyzed and bring a reader closer to the meaning. Lengthwise the work centers around a mechanical device meant to recreating love and it is through this theme that the author explores the uncomfortable relationship between the continuing the progress of technology and the real human emotion. Anstett also quizzes how artificial intelligence may attempt to emulate and fail to match theses of loving affection that can be found in human expression by combining several techniques of different language with tone markers. Dialogue especially exhibits how the emotional traits are opposed towards the empty rhythm of the machine in that it rebels against the heartless center of the machine world. Visual differences at the end also suggest the reader to consider again the issue of personal identity and how the feeling of belonging to humanity can be changed and/or produced. As the characters finally realize the disturbance that technology brings into their emotions, plot becomes increasingly romantic, leaving behind early feeling of detachment and calling for sympathy. Deliberate choices of words, then, demonstrate primary themes in the work-balance, loss, agency, which reverberate with our experience today with the devices that connect us both technologically and emotionally. Such stylistic criticism becomes an important resource in the bigger study, providing literary researchers with a guide to investigating the heavily laden interface of innovation and attachment.