THE POWERS OF THE FALSE : Reading, Writing, Thinking Beyond Truth and Fiction

Wiese, Doro

ISBN 10: 0810130041 / ISBN 13: 9780810130043

Published by Northwesterm University Press, 2014

About this Item

263pp. Trade paperback, VG, index, works cited, chapter notes, THE POWERS OF THE FALSE : Reading, Writing, Thinking Beyond Truth and Fiction,

Seller Inventory # w180825652

Bibliographic Details

• Title: THE POWERS OF THE FALSE : Reading, Writing, Thinking Beyond Truth and Fiction
• Publisher: Northwesterm University Press
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810130041
• ISBN 13: 9780810130043
• Binding: Soft Cover
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature
  • Literary Criticism
  • Linguistics

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Doro Wiese is a lecturer in comparative literature and gender studies at Utrecht University.