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The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin explores how Le Guin's fiction
and essays have built a speculative ethical practice engaging
indigenous knowledge and feminism, while crafting utopias in which
human and other-than-human life forms enter into new relations. Her
work also delineates new ways of making sense of the "science" of
science fiction. The authors of this collection provide up-to-date
discussions of well-known works as well as more experimental
writings. Written in an accessible style, Legacies will appeal to
any readers interested in literature, science fiction and fantasy,
as well as specialists of science and technology studies,
philosophy of science, ethics, gender studies, indigenous studies
and posthumanism.
This collection aims to examine the relationship between American
fiction and innovations that marked the first decades of the 21st
century: the Internet, social media, smart objects and
environments, artificial intelligence, nanotechnologies, genetic
engineering and other biotechnologies, transhumanism. These
technological innovations redefine the way we live in and imagine
our world, interact with each other and understand the human being
in his or her ever closer relationship to the machine a human being
no longer, as in the past, cared for or repaired, but now enhanced
or replaced. What about our artistic and cultural practices? Are
these recent advances changing language and literature? How is
fiction transformed by technological progress and what
representations of progress can it oppose? Can fiction offer a
critique of the new media and the upheavals they precipitate? How
does the temporality of literature respond to a technical time
subjected to the imperative of efficiency, where the present is a
slave to the future? Do virtual worlds challenge the primacy of
literary fiction as a privileged mode of escape from daily life? In
a context where software can generate literary works, can the force
of poetical advent still oppose algorithmic logics? What becomes of
the body in a world in which its technical extensions increase the
externalization of its cognitive functions in media artifacts and
digital networks? In order to explore these questions, scholars
here investigate the American fiction of Russel Banks, Don DeLillo,
David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Tao Lin, Richard Powers,
Kenneth Goldsmith, Jennifer Egan or Jonathan Franzen as well as the
Cyberpunk genre and the Neuronovel.
Why is David Foster Wallace so widely read? Why does his fiction
and non-fiction continue to raise enthusiasm among an ever-growing
variety of readers of all ages and backgrounds not only in the
English-speaking countries but all over the world, while describing
all the malcontents, dead ends and solipsistic tendencies of
contemporary civilisation? Presences of the Other counteracts the
vision of Wallaces postmodern oeuvre as selfishly self-absorbed,
narcissistic or confining and attempts to answer the question of
its appeal by addressing it as an open work, following Umberto Ecos
definition of great texts. Epitomised in the missing questions of
Brief Interviews; in the endnotes of Infinite Jest that entice
readers into fertile wanderings; or in The Pale King demands for
active editing and creative involvement, DFWs paradoxically
difficult and impenetrable work opens up and allows for limitless
interventions and participations. By becoming a playground for
interpretation, his work reveals itself as an exercise in care.
Indeterminate and inconclusive, constructed on Derridean
difference, DFWs output testifies to the presence of a liberating
symbolic Other; by resisting closure, it promotes both a
fundamental reworking of the literary tradition and a compassionate
vision of the human condition. Prominent scholars explore varieties
of otherness in Wallaces open work by engaging with the dialogue
his writing establishes with non-literary discourses such as cinema
(French Nouvelle Vague), music (rap, in Signifying Rappers),
religion (Buddhism) and philosophy (Wittgenstein and Ranciere).
Critical approaches to the authors protean identity, taste for
masquerade and performance, and capacity for metamorphosis and
transformation, foreground traces of an otherness that sets out a
salutary spiritual potential for the 21st century.
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