The Notebook

Formalistic Approach to Karel Capek's R.U.R

In Karel Capek's Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.), the text speaks of a metaphor because it explains the resemblance or likeness of robots and humans, as well as its differences. Also, it speaks of old and young (engineer) Rossum who were able to produce these replicas of human beings. Another is about how these Russums tried to pretend like God and justified their actions that it was for the sake of humanity, for them to live a life of luxury and without hard labor, or labor per se.

I think the object that was defamiliarized was the robot. We already have a schema on how a robot looks like. Basically, it is a machine and without human emotions at all. But in the text, it was showed that robots were made to look exactly like humans. The old Rossum wanted just to create another human being and not just robots, but he failed to make it successful for it only lived for three days. Unlike the old Rossum, the young Rossum was able to create robots, as workers, who somehow think and act like humans, who has the physical features of men but have no pleasure and interest in life at all. The evidence that robots really resemble humans was when Helena did not notice that Domin's secretary, Sulla, was a robotess. Hundreds of years after the time of Rossum, Domin's colleagues were able to make the robots look exactly like humans using the Rossum's formula. The robots were defamiliarized from what we really think of how they should look like. Actually, they should look like metals but in this text, they were made to have the fresh skin of a human, humans' eyes, hair and all its facial features, but highly intelligent than most humans. Our concept of robots, somehow, is that they do not really

move the way we do it. There must be some strange thing about their movement. But in this case, Helena did not notice it too. Robots in this text are not what we perceived a robot should look like and should behave. And the robots were created that way to support the reason why they were made: to replace humans as laborers of