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
There is More than One Site of Resistance
Ironie und Parodie im zeitgenossischen Roman der Chicanos/as
Volume 98
Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire’s Aesthetic Architecture of Revolt
An Axial Analysis
Volume 312
Poetics of Politics
Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture
Volume 258
Undoing Difference?
Race and Gender in Selected Works by Toni Morrison and Jeanette Winterson
Volume 224
AlterNative Spaces
Constructions of Space in Native American and First Nations' Literatures
Volume 146
Re-Imagining Nature’s Nation
Native American and Native Hawaiian Literature, Environment, and Empire
Volume 267
Voices of the Down and Out
The Dust Bowl Migration and the Great Depression in the Songs of Woody Guthrie
Volume 153
Kulturkontakt und Racial Presences
Afro-Amerikaner und die deutsche Amerika-Literatur, 1815-1914
Volume 126
Perspectives on Values
The Network of Satire and Humor, the Tragic and the Absurd, the Grotesque and the Monstrous, Play and Irony, Parody and the Comic Mode
Volume 323
Aesthetic Innovation and the Democratic Principle
Essays on Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Fiction
Volume 279
Betwixt, between, or beyond?
Negotiating 'Trans' formations from the Liminal Sphere of Contemporary Black Performance Poetry
Volume 215
Similar Books
Writing of Women as Cultural Resistance
Deconstructing Memory Legacies in the Afro-Luso-Brazilian Atlantic
Althochdeutsche Stabreimdichtungen
Hildebrandslied, Muspilli und kleinere Denkmaler. Von Grund auf neu ediert, mit Erschliessungshilfen versehen, ubersetzt und eingeleitet von Frank Schafer
