Research Catalog

Title

The powers of the false : reading, writing, thinking beyond truth and fiction / Doro Wiese.

Author

Wiese, Doro

Publication

Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2014.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 263 pages; 23 cm.

Summary

Can literature make it possible to represent histories that are otherwise ineffable? Making use of the Deleuzian concept of "the powers of the false, " Doro Wiese offers readings of three novels that deal with the Shoah, with colonialism, and with racialized identities. She argues that Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish, and Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing are novels in which a space for unvoiced, silent, or silenced difference is created. Seen through the lens of Deleuze and his collaborators' philosophy, literature is a means for mediating knowledge and affects about historical events. Going beyond any simple dichotomy between true and untrue accounts of what "really" happened in the past, literature's powers of the false incite readers to long for a narrative space in which painful or shameful stories can be included.--

Series Statement

Flashpoints

Uniform Title

• Project Muse UPCC books
• FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.)

Subject

• Foer, Jonathan Safran, 1977-
• Flanagan, Richard, 1961-
• Powers, Richard, 1957-
• Foer, Jonathan Safran, 1977- > Criticism and interpretation
• Flanagan, Richard, 1961- > Criticism and interpretation
• Powers, Richard, 1957- > Criticism and interpretation
• 2000-talet
• 2000-2099
• American fiction > 21st century > History and criticism
• English fiction > 21st century > History and criticism
• History in literature
• Truthfulness and falsehood in literature

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-257) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction -- The truth of narration and the powers of the false -- Accepting complicated legacies by being once removed from the world : Everything is illuminated (Foer 2002) -- "He looked for truth in facts and not in stories" : crimes of historiography and forces of fabulation in Richard Flanagan's Gould's book of fish (2003) -- Making time, undoing race: Richard Powers' The time of our singing (2003) -- Conclusion.

ISBN

• 9780810130043
• 0810130041

LCCN

^^2014004908

OCLC

• 870439187
• SCSB-12552223

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library