Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismRetrofitting RomanticismHere's how it would work. Romanticism would characterize not a historical period, but certain discourses at play in a historical period. For the most part they remain, in Foucault's terms "subjugated discourses." [1] We should accept, even celebrate, the minority status of Romanticism. It certainly wasn't what Pitt's England was up to from, say, 1793 to 1815. Discourses other than literature fall into the constellation we label Romantic: popular, religious, medical, theatrical. We can parse writers or even writers' careers according to the relation between their writing and such discourses. [2] I'm willing to admit that Wordsworth had his romantic moments (mostly with Dorothy), but that hardly makes his writing a consistent instance of Romanticism. Notes1. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et. al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 81. 2. How about an anthology of subjugated writing that would include oppositional or just plain crack-pot voices: Blake, Spence, Equiano, Southcote, Dorothy Wordsworth, Wedderburn, to name a few? Navigation |