Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

Symptoms of the Future

Can we come to see Romanticism, not as a cipher of the past, but as a symptom of the future? It could be argued that the future as a cultural category emerges here, whether as imperial consolidation or radical insurgence. [1]   In both cases a social possibility becomes visible on the basis of secular imagination. Christian prophecy falls into futurology, Blake's Jerusalem into Shelley's The Last Man. Are there Romanticisms of the future? [2]  


Notes

1. Frederic Jameson tracks the insurgence of Utopia in Western culture in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005).

2. Science fiction might be--technoscientific Romanticism, if there could be such a thing. See Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979).


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