Nothing Risked, Nothing Gained: Richard Powers' Gain and the Horizon of Risk
This essay interprets Richard Powers' sixth novel Gain with reference to the German sociologist Ulrich Beck's concept of “second modernity.” The concept underscores the dispersal of risk and how it shreds promissory notes understood in “first modernity” between the future and present and t...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Association Française d'Etudes Américaines
2010-02-01
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| Series: | Transatlantica |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/4632 |
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| Summary: | This essay interprets Richard Powers' sixth novel Gain with reference to the German sociologist Ulrich Beck's concept of “second modernity.” The concept underscores the dispersal of risk and how it shreds promissory notes understood in “first modernity” between the future and present and the insides and outsides of the body. It argues that Beck supplies an apt interpretive framework for understanding these relationships and overcoming the categorical impasses between the two narrative words at work in Power's novel, the biographical situatedness of Laura Rowen Bodey's illness and the corporate history of the Clare conglomerate. |
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| ISSN: | 1765-2766 |