Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismThe Extrusion of the Quest RomanceWith the demise of interiority (do I speak prematurely?) internalization seems quaint. [1] It's pointless, culturally speaking, to follow a poet's inner quest for paradise. Shelley is welcome to his Epipsyche, Keats to his Moneta. Why guarantee irrelevance by repeating their antiquated dreams? We can, however, turn the quest back outward, extrude it, approach it less as a psychological than a technological effect. Not the Imagination but the Internet is a landscape of desire. Digitally speaking, what is now imagined was once only true. The media dream for us, and we inhabit their simulations. [2] The question to put to Romantic writers is how they advance this process. Perhaps their interiorizations are indices of earlier extrusions. Notes1. See Harold Bloom, "The Interiorization of the Quest Romance" Romanticism and Consciousness, ed., Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), 3-23. 2. The great theorist of this reversal is J. G. Ballard. See The Atrocity Exhibition (San Francisco: RE/Search, 1991). Navigation |