Promethean Mnemotechnics: Memory, Forgetting, Episodic Future Thought and Nonviolent Revolution

Abstract

In his Prometheus Unbound, Shelley reinterprets the Promethean mythologeme historicistically and psychodynamically as a response to his time’s political and ideological crisis. The Titan is resemiotised as the central figure of a metapsychological drama, in which the dialectic between the protagonist and his different chronoceptions, represented in the text as characters, takes the form of a complex multivocal negotiation between different types of memory and forgetting, synchronicistic contemplations of the present and protensive anticipations towards the future. These elements converge into a powerful strategy of mental action, or Promethean mnemotechnics, through which the protagonist first releases himself from the captivity of the tyrant Jupiter and then becomes a pragmatic model, to be followed in the reader’s extratextual dimension.

Keywords

• p. b. shelley
• prometheus unbound
• chronoception
• prophetic poetry
• episodic future thinking
• memory and forgetting
• memories of the future