ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

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.

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