Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality by Peter Otto (review)

Book Reviews Peter Otto. Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 332. $110. The Brocken spectre, a natural phenomenon in which the interplay of a sinking sun and a misty atmosphere create a “natural magic lantern” pro­ jecting a giant shadow onto the mist, was commonly viewed by Romantic writers as an analogy for the inextricability of perception and artistic cre­ ation, and of the self and the external world (225). As the spectator of a Brocken spectre moves, she sees a giant simulation of herself in the air, tracking her movements. The uncanny and disorienting effect of the Brocken spectre became emblematic of the unreliability of the sensory apparatus and of the unstable boundary between actual and imagined worlds. Peter Otto argues that this awareness of both the limitations and creative potential of human perception takes on central importance in the Romantic period. Multiplying Worlds is structured in three parts, tracing the pivotal moves in the development of this awareness. The first section ex­ plores the construction of immersive public entertainments that offered hyper-realistic visual simulations of the real world. Section two turns to­ wards “textual virtual realities” in Gothic literary productions, tracing an eighteenth-century turn from what Azade Seyhan has called a “poetic mi­ mesis” centered on representation towards a “critical poiesis” grounded in the problematic of virtual reality. Finally, section three explores the treat­ ment ofthis problematic in canonical Romanticism, arguing that the virtu­ ality helped shape the Romantic subject’s practice of narrating and con­ structing the external world. First coined in 1986, the term “virtual reality” has been applied to a wide range of technologies and activities that increasingly structure contempo­ rary life. While there may be broad agreement that, at least in some sense, our lives are more “virtual” than ever before, there is no consensus either about the causes of this increasingly virtual world or about its implications. The first uses of “virtual reality” referred to a handful of technologies, such as viewing goggles and reality gloves, designed to create immersive, threedimensional electronic simulations of physical reality. The term later came to refer more broadly to the range ofsocial, economic, and recreational ac­ tivities carried out in digital spaces in an increasingly “posthuman” context, anticipating Jean Baudrillard’s entirely virtual world. Foregrounding “virSiR , 52 (Spring 2013) 147 148 BOOK REVIEWS tual reality” as a category of phenomenological experience rather than as attendant on a particular technological apparatus, other theorists challenged the novelty of the late twentieth-century condition, arguing that all forms of human interaction with the world—reasoning, perceiving, feeling—are in a sense “virtual.” Otto rejects both these views, arguing that virtual reality is neither unique to the contemporary world nor a transhistorical property of human nature but instead emerged at a specific historical moment, around the turn of the nineteenth century, developing from the interplay of “the con­ flicting rhetorics of Enlightenment and Romanticism” (13). Multiplying Worlds provides intriguing and innovative readings of a wide range ofliter­ ary texts, staged entertainments, visual displays, and public spaces, suggest­ ing the evolution of a mode of self-conscious perception in which observ­ ers become aware of the fluidity of spatial and temporal boundaries and of their active role in shaping the external world through the process ofseeing and interpreting. Otto begins his account with readings ofphysical spaces, both actual (the vast, hyperrealistic panoramas ofRobert Barker and James Graham’s Tem­ ple of Health and Hymen) and unrealized (Bentham’s Panopticon), that ap­ peared in and around London in the latter two decades of the eighteenth century. In an intriguing revision of Foucault’s reading of the Panopticon, Otto suggests that the prison’s effect on its inmates mirrors the “virtual realities” of popular entertainments in London of the period, such as “shadow shows,” in which plays were acted out in silhouette. Attempts to create an immersive, large-scale reproduction of the external world in this period, such as the panoramas of London and of scenes from classical his­ tory, accompanied and intensified what Otto calls a Kantian “crisis in rep­ resentation characteristic of modernity” (42). This epistemic shift fore­ grounded the...