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

In his Prometheus Unbound, Shelley reinterprets the Promethean mythologeme historicistically and psychodynamically as a response to his time’s political and ideological crisis, making the literary text a powerful psychagogic tool, functional to the start of a nonviolent revolution. The Titan is, therefore, resemiotized 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, through projective personification, takes the form of a complex multivocal negotiation between different types of memory (autobiographical and collective) and forgetting (involuntary and selective), synchronicistic contemplations of the present (both historical and trans-historical) and protensive anticipations towards the future through a varied and multilevel kind of episodic future thinking (intentional, prospective, possible and pseudo-conditional future; prophecy; memories of 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.