Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality. Peter Otto.

Abstract

Peter Otto, Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and Emergence of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press, 2011) xiv + 322 $110.00 Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the. Emergence of Virtual Reality, Peter Otto explores relationship between and contemporary discourse of reality. Believing that Romantic era is inception point of modern forms of (7), Otto seeks to historicize and ultimately reconfigure assumptions about virtual. The intervention of Multiplying Worlds is to redress assumptions about value of Romantic imagination, demoting it to periphery of Romantic scholarship, asserting that long-standing preoccupation with imagination obscures contributions that reality makes to robust understanding of Romantic era. Rather than revisiting tired questions as to whether imaginative creation is true or false, redemptive or toxic, Multiplying Worlds argues for turn away from imagination and toward more fruitful concept of reality. The critical energy of this study resides in definition of principal term. Virtual reality may be approached neither in exclusive terms of helmet-and-glove hardware and immersive computer-generated environments, nor in totalizing terms that understand reality to be endemic to Western art. The outcome is historical argument limited in scope by idea that there is special relationship between Romantic era and contemporary digital information culture. Turning to Romantic-era poetic theory, Otto asserts that there is aesthetic resemblance (12) between Coleridge's concept of 'willing suspension of disbelief' and immersive experience of digitally-produced reality. On this basis, Multiplying Worlds declares that reality may best be understood as dynamic in which actual and aesthetic 'worlds' multiply and then become confounded, decentering sense of reference to shared 'real': In both and postmodernism, immersion/suspension of disbelief eclipses 'real' and in its place opens heterocosm, world (purportedly) of imaginative and expressive freedom centered on individual ... reality itself comes to seem virtual (13). Multiplying Worlds charges these separate or alternative 'worlds' of reality with distinctively empowering ethos available in contemporary culture but originating in Romantic era: Romanticism first thinks as 'the space of emergence of new, unthought, unrealized' (191). Multiplying Worlds punctuates this optimism when it adapts P.B. Shelley's theory of poetry, proclaiming that reality defeats curse which binds us to be subjected to accident of surrounding impressions and that it creates anew universe (13). The book grounds itself in well-established discourse in Romantic scholarship that recognizes popular culture as crucial component of Romanticism. William Galperin's Return of Visible in British (1993) and Gillen D'Arcy Wood's The Shock of Real: and Visual Culture, 1760-1860 (2001) are two especially influential studies in this regard. Galperin's organizing trope is visible--as opposed to visionary of high Wordsworthian criticism --and his argument is that visual culture can, in conjunction with poetry, render more complete picture of politics and aesthetics of Romantic era and technological and cultural trends endemic to that era that would lead to cinema. More tendentiously, Wood argues that expressive theories of artistic production associated with M.H. Abrams's lamp compete with a new visual-cultural industry of mass production, spectacle, and simulation (7). Interested in repudiation of the reality effect (3) by such eminent poets as Coleridge and Wordsworth, Wood traces an emblematic crisis of Romantic idealism in emergent visual culture of modernity (10). …