Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismFlatlineDixie Flatline. He's a ROM construct stored on a hard drive. [1] He's achieved limited immortality, the perpetual if suspended animation of information. Digital salvation. In this he resembles any dead author. The Romantics too are flatliners. They live again when we snap that stud, open the book, and boot up their constructs. [2] But in the meantime they're just data. They're words, digits, information. Thanks to the technologies of data storage, Romantic writing drifts free of the illusions of Authorship and Literature to become what it always aspired to be: a means to new lives, new worlds, new possibilities. Notes1. See William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984). Of course, Dixie Flatline "wants" to be erased. But then, perhaps some of the Romantics do too--Byron, for instance, in his more Manfredesque moods. 2. No one--or perhaps nowhere--more obviously than William Blake. Visit The William Blake Archive, www.blakearchive.org. Navigation |