ABSTRACT
Chapter 5, “Romantic Myth-Subjectivity: Wordsworth and Shelley,” examines Romantic metasubjectivity's operations in the libidinal matrix of Romantic poetry by taking up Romanticism's emphasis on mythology as a general economy of nonmolar forces and intensities. Schelling's lectures on mythology express this economy as a “system of the gods” [Götterlehre], a nexus of “theogonic forces” from which specific pantheons emerge. Moreover, Jung and Karl Kerényi published Essays on a Science of Mythology (1941), which directly takes up Schelling's notion of “mythologems” as combinatory forces. The chapter then turns to two Romantic “Prometheanisms” which both court and resist this potentiated economy. William Wordsworth's The Prelude (1799/1805/1850) develops three sites of “Promethean” theft as crucial to the growth of a poet's mind, and the intensity of these encounters is gradually inhibited in subsequent revisions. Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820) is a dissociationist topography of the Romantic metasubjective psyche, whose characters cast Schelling's system of the gods as “operations of the human mind.” Retro-analysing the psyche of Wordsworth's poet, Shelley's poem tells two narratives which cannot tell each other: the traumatic emergence of consciousness from the unconscious and a politically idealist narrative of emancipation from tyranny which bids to negate the first.
