Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismThe Death of the BookIn our field (for I assume you are a Romanticist) the web is a trove of simulated treasures: The Blake Archive, ECCO, Romanticism on the Net, Romantic Circles, The Voice of the Shuttle, to name a few. It's a bibliophile's paradise--or whorehouse. Everything you could possibly desire hangs there waiting and, uh, ready. But that's the problem. We've entered a brothel and we're behaving as if it were a library. [1] The web is not a book. What would happen if we adapted to this space the way Byron adapted to Italy? [2] What would studies in Romanticism become--some hideous new progeny? Notes1. See Levy, Pierre, Cyberculture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001). 2. For an example, see Steven Shaviro, connected: or what it means to live in the network society (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003). Navigation |