Search Results

This chapter, building on Ch. 4, analyzes the representation of local risk scenarios in two American novels that focus on exposure to chemical toxins, Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Richard Powers’s Gain. DeLillo’s novel, which reflects on a wide range of chemical risks from industrial toxins all the way to psychopharmaceuticals, uses postmodern satire to shed light on the difficulties of telling reality apart from cultural perception in the context of ecological and technological hazards. It portrays a “risk society” in Ulrich Beck’s sense in which risk has become part of the fabric of everyday life for ordinary citizens. Powers’s Gain outlines a similar scenario but explores in depth the rise of transnational corporations and global economic networks that give rise to local risks. While his narrative, more so than DeLillo’s, seeks to highlight the way in which the inhabitation of the local is shaped by global forces, it is less successful than DeLillo’s in developing a narrative technique commensurate with this ambition; Powers’s omniscient narration does not allow for the indeterminacies of risk perception that DeLillo translates into narrative form.

This chapter presents a reading of Richard Powers' Plowing the Dark (2000). The novel offers a provocative exploration of the unexpected interplay of art and religion through an account of virtual reality (VR) technology. The narrative weaves together two stories that unfold on opposite sides of the world—a VR lab in Seattle and a terrorist cell in Lebanon. West and East meet in Hagia Sophia, where Byzantine mosaics are transformed by the Web browser Mosaic. Powers sees connections where others see oppositions. He suggests that religion, art, and technology all express the human longing for some kind of transcendence. The question that lingers after the end of the book is whether technology has displaced art, which previously had displaced religion, as the most telling manifestation of contemporary spiritual aspiration. If so, what are the tenets and practical implications of this belief?

This chapter argues that cognitive fictions expand the focus of the quiet novel, uncovering the complex and often discordant recesses of human consciousness and challenging the traditional division between what is internally and externally felt. This chapter connects the discussion of a quiet aesthetic with early twenty-first century debates about the place of cognitive approaches within literary studies. Indeed, the novel of cognition also recalls the modernist ‘stream’ or ‘novel of consciousness’ whose rich and ambiguous history overlaps with the quiet novels discussed throughout this study.

Through Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations (1991) and The Echo Maker (2006), this chapter examines wonder, an affect related to intellection that is essential to inspiring medical and environmental inquiry. Nature writers have turned to wonder to spark ecological awareness as a first step to promoting environmental care. Informed by new scientific paradigms, however, contemporary fiction rethinks the trajectories of wonder. The oscillation between familiarity and strangeness is the connection between the novel's two narratives as it defines the workings of cognition and of environmental awakening. This oscillation is also the generator of wonder itself. Toggling between a series of binaries, however, the text reveals that wonder can tip over into projection and paranoia, relations that divert energies away from ethical involvement. Ultimately, Powers's ecosickness fiction is a rejoinder to common places about connection and care found in environmental thought.

This chapter considers the new relations of past and present to future that have emerged in the wake of scientific discoveries in genetics and other medical technologies. The first section links Australian novelist Gerald Murnane with established English writer Ian McEwan, suggesting how for both writers the representation of memory, cultural as well as personal, has been mediated by developments in science. The second section, ‘The American Systems Novel’, extends this analysis by considering how genetics shape the plot of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex and how 9/11 scrambles understandings of temporal sequence in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It concludes by discussing how the historical context of postmodernist science inflects representations of temporal sequence in the novels of Richard Powers, which address issues of computer technology, ecology, and environmentalism, while also representing the aesthetics of temporality in relation to the abstract language of music.

This book explores the complex interrelation of religion, literature, and philosophy by focusing on single works by four American writers: William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo. With one exception, these writers are not concerned with or directly influenced by European philosophy. However, just as religion is most interesting where it is least obvious, so philosophy often is important even when it is not recognized or acknowledged. The point of this study is not to trace historical influences but to explore pressing contemporary issues that the nexus of religion, literature, and technology illuminates. Gaddis, Powers, Danielewski, and DeLillo all share a recognition of the ways in which new media, communications, and information technologies transformed life during the latter half of the twentieth century and continue to shape our world in predictable and unpredictable ways. Neither simply utopian nor dystopian, they acknowledge that these developments both change the conditions of cultural production and pose unprecedented artistic challenges.

This chapter describes the shift in representations of figures with cognitive or linguistic impairments that comes with the enormous acceleration of knowledge in neuroscience. The imaginings of radical alterity are no longer relevant in the context neuroscience, which insists that knowledge of brain processes holds the key to understanding all aspects of human thought, feeling, behavior, and culture. The chapter suggests a “defense of narrative” against methodologies that bypass narrative's and language's intrinsic ambiguities and contingencies. Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, and Richard Powers's The Echo Maker draw heavily on neuroscientific knowledge and present clinical descriptions of the impairments at the centers of their stories. These “neuronovels” understand neuroscience in an expansivesense, one in which the complex, productive-receptive, and irreducible structure and function of the brain finds its most characteristic expression in human language use with all its indeterminacies.

DNA profiling, in which individual being is identified by its cellular structures, was first developed by the geneticist Alec Jeffreys in the 1980s. That this source of identity also forms the instructions through which living organisms are generated has complicated profiling’s place in the cultural imaginary of the late twentieth century. So, while profiling actually deals only in non-coding regions of the genome—matter often referred to as ‘junk DNA’—the significance of DNA as a substance of forensic analysis, in the late twentieth century imaginary, is its resonance as the apparent blueprint of existence. The notable features that this blurring of concepts brings about include a conceptualization of identity as a mass of information; notions to do with codes and coding; the presence of the body in the fluids which spill beyond its bounds; and a sense of the body as an archive of heredity and primitivism. In writing specifically about genetic research, Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991) serves a dual function in this chapter, as both an explicatory document and thematic example. But the more substantive analysis is reserved for the work of J. G. Ballard which, from its science fiction origins in novels such as The Drowned World (1962), through the controversial era of Crash (1973), to its trilogy of autobiographical texts (Empire of the Sun (1984), The Kindness of Women (1991), and Miracles of Life (2008)) articulates a form of identity that has close, though often oblique, affinities with all the most prominent features of DNA profiling.

This chapter initially tackles the story of No Impact Man in an effort to present a real-life version of the novelty without waste, or gain without risk ideology; a behavior which can be understood through Ulrich Beck’s theory of second modernity. According to Beck, the decisive shift between the two modernities entails a transition of cultural logic from wealth distribution to risk distribution. Under the first modernity, the past determines the future; in the risk society however, the present is (over)determined by the future. The chapter cites Fight Club, both the novel and the film, and Richard Powers’ novel Gain in presenting a dichotomy: the former depicts how the individual is fragmented by commodity culture, while the latter argues that the role of the consumer in the corporation is damage, involvement, and exposure to risk.

The final chapter pulls the threads of the book’s argument together through an account of the structure of embodied selfhood. Beginning with a story by Thomas Mann which explores body/mind dualism, it picks up that topic in contemporary analytic philosophy (Parfit’s disembodied minds and Strawson’s meditation on embodied personhood). Bodies are at once material and fantasmatic, deeply informing the way we think the world through language and existing experientially as schemata that organize our socio-spatial relation to ourselves and others. The theoretical focus here is on the work of various cognitive and neuro-scientists (Clark, Gallagher, Damasio, Varela and others) and on feminist philosophers such as Gatens and Grosz. Finally, the argument is extended to cinematic bodies, looking at the way Blade Runner uses the figure of the replicant to problematize the relation between the embodied human and its simulation.

Chapter Four asks what happens when the physical markers of identity are rendered in the language of digital code. In the contemporary moment, fingerprints and DNA profiles are stored and matched through networked databases rather than paper records, while iris scans and facial recognition technology have produced radically new modes of reading identity in the body. This digitization of identification is accentuated still further when the more mundane means of identifying oneself in the contemporary period (through the use of credit cards or in ‘checking in’ to a workplace) are considered. Taking place within an essentially surveillant contemporary culture, these validations of identity create a retrievable record of one’s movements and activities and place the citizen’s body in the ‘non-place’ of networked databases in which a direct checking of what Haggerty and Ericson describe as ‘data doubles’ takes place. As with Chapter Three, much of the significance that is attached to this development in recent identificatory practice will be developed via Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations. This explication will cede into a more thorough analysis of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984) and Cosmopolis (2003) and Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me (2001). While DeLillo’s earlier text represents some of the archetypal modes of contemporary surveillance, both Cosmopolis and Look at Me depict a complete internalization of its logic. Thus, just as DeLillo and Egan’s central characters voluntarily place themselves under surveillant monitoring, so too their representation as, in effect, data doubles requires a decidedly anti-realist form of narration.