ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This article aims to point out the humans’ estrangement with the nature and the inner self, and to find the positive solutions through recovering the emotional empathy for the sustainable self in posthuman age in Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker. This systems novel shows that the self can be formed with the dynamic interactions of environments. Powers uses Mark Schluter’s Capgras syndrome caused by his truck-overturn accident as the metaphor of the human and eco-systemic sickness, noticing the imbricated features of neural and ecological networks as the connected but fragile system. Powers proposes the futuristic posthuman self to confront the excessively advanced technology society, deconstructing the dualism of nature-human, body-mind, reason-emotion and self-other. He searches for the positive solutions to get out of the isolated, self-defensive situation and to enhance the empathy in the relation with the nature. Mark’s excessive paranoia is correlated with his awareness of the developers’ rampant attempts to appropriate the river and to threaten the sandhill cranes at the Platte River in Nebraska. Karin, Mark’s sister misrecognized as an imposter by her brother retrospects herself and puts herself towards the concerns of cranes. In her epiphanic moment, Karin realizes that the cranes can have the kinship in our next generation, sharing the genetic bonds with humans. During his medical treatment for Mark, Weber realizes his loss of the emotional affection, suffering the contagious Capgras. Weber gradually retrospects his interior mind and repents his faults. Weber promotes the leap of his empathy and tries to link the deep separated barriers of his inner-outer self. Finally they understand the concept of a drifting, improvised self rather than a whole, willful and embodied self. In conclusion, Powers emphasizes on the instable, plastic and fluid self, having the unlimited sub-systems. He accentuates on the self’s dialogic relations with the others in the communal society. He proposes the vision of posthuman intersubjective self that the humans should activate the corresponding affect of wonder by the familiarity-strangeness interactions and recognize the importances of caring the others and tending the nonhuman species.

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