The Powers of the False: Reading, Writing, Thinking beyond Truth and Fiction (FlashPoints)

Wiese, Doro

ISBN 10: 0810130041 / ISBN 13: 9780810130043

Published by Northwestern University Press, 2014

About this Item

Seller Inventory # mon0003530301

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Powers of the False: Reading, Writing, Thinking beyond Truth and Fiction (FlashPoints)
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810130041
• ISBN 13: 9780810130043
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good

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.