Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismHero with a Thousand FacesByron's Juan is a strange "hero" for a British epic. He's a deracinated Hidalgo cast adrift literally and culturally to wend his aimless way beyond the bounds of Europe and good breeding. He has no identity in the novelistic sense. There are as many Juans as there are circumstances. Identity turns performative and hybridizing. [1] When in Greece, do as the Greeks. When in Russia, do as the Russians. When in Barbary, become a barbarian. Juan adapts to the cultures he encounters and adapts them to his amours. In this he offers a model for becoming other. What if Romanticism were as nimble as this nomad? [2] Notes1. Juan--or maybe Byron--provides a keen instance of the kind of performative sexual identity Judith Butler advocates in Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1991). 2. You might end up with a Romanticism that approaches the rhizomatic as Deleuze and Guattari describe it in the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987). Navigation |