심미적 감수성의 회복과 포스트휴먼 창의적 글쓰기: 리처드 파워즈의 『관대함』

Resilience of Aesthetic Sensitivity and Posthuman Creative Writing: Richard Powers’s Generosity

This study explores how Algerian immigrant Thassa is brought to life through her writing teacher Russell Stone’s imaginative rewriting in Richard Powers’s Generosity. Her habitual joy and vitality attract the media attention, leading to the commercialization of her genes in a postgenomic consumer society and ultimately to her disillusionment in the pursuit of happiness. The novel traces Russell’s the process of recognition and transformation. Russell overcomes his writer’s block and fear of criticism, abandons escapist writing, and reclaims his aesthetic and ethical engagement to help others. Generosity offers a vitalist posthuman perspective, highlighting mutual entanglement beyond binaries like technology vs. nature or reason vs. emotion. It promotes postanthropocentrism and interdisciplinary reciprocity, urging openness, empathy, and community in the digital age. Russell’s ‘creative nonfiction’ illustrates the links between emotional resilience, quality of life, and narrative in a genomics-driven society. Ultimately, the novel proposes cognitive flexibility, emotional expression, empathy, and cooperation with the others as posthuman vitalist ethics for fostering the adaptive community and a more humane future.