Walking the Mobius Strip
An Inquiry into Knowing in Richard Powers's Fiction
by Johanna Heil
Walking the Mobius Strip locates Richard Powers’s fiction at the crossroads of postmodern and post-postmodern aesthetics and argues that this paradigm shift shapes the models of knowledge and understanding that underwrite his work. The readings of Plowing the Dark, Galatea 2.2, and The Echo Maker are inspired by Jacques Lacan’s image of cognition as a Mobius strip on which different forms of propositional and non-propositional knowledge bleed into and depend upon one another. Drawing on feminist epistemology and psychoanalysis, this study highlights Powers’s interest in the non-propositional aspects of cognition, that is, in all that escapes the frameworks of scientific empiricism and can only be known through the mediation of fictional narrative. It reveals a deep dissatisfaction in the novels with the suggestion that knowledge and understanding must be objective and rational, and elucidates Powers’s idea that fiction can be a powerful tool for integrating various kinds of knowledge.
- By (author) Johanna Heil
Other Titles in this Series
Walking in the Wilderness
The Peripatetic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Painting
Volume 134
Deliberately Out of Bounds
Women's Work on Classical Myth in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction
Volume 282
Transnational Mediations
Negotiating Popular Culture between Europe and the United States
Volume 261
American Studies/Shifting Gears
A Publication of the DFG Research Network 'The Futures of (European) American Studies'
Volume 185
Migration – Miscegenation – Transculturation
Writing Multicultural America into the Twentieth Century
Volume 114
Temporality in American Filmic Autobiography
Cinema, Automediality and Grammatology with 'Film Portrait' and 'Joyce at 34'
Volume 187
Medical Humanities in American Studies
Life Writing, Narrative Medicine, and the Power of Autobiography
Volume 292
Faith Matters
Religion, Ethnicity, and Survival in Louise Erdrich's and Toni Morrison's Fiction
Volume 149
Narrative Instability
Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture
Volume 305
Schauspiele des Sehens
Die Figur der Flaneurin, Voyeurin und Stalkerin im U.S.-amerikanischen Essay
Volume 239
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