The work of gender in fictions of science: A study of literary amateurs in the novels of Margaret Atwood, Richard Powers, Joan Didion and Don DeLillo.

This study explores the reasons why current critical paradigms and reading lists of a contemporary literature of science emphasize masculinity as a standard trope of assessment. Because science and technology have been viewed as citadels of masculine endeavor, it comes as no surprise that literary criticism reflects these key suppositions as well. Rather than claim a mastery of complex scientific equations, theorems and disciplines, the novelists in this study more accurately use the novel as an interdisciplinary forum for analyzing the culture that surrounds scientific production. By exploring the figuration of gender and science within the fiction of four influential contemporary novelists--Joan Didion, Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood and Richard Powers--a persistent story of women's disruptions of professional fields begins to unfold. Through an analysis of the ways in which these writers deploy characters in relation to traditionally masculine domains of power and authority, the significance and situation of gender in contemporary fictions of science can be given the centrality it deserves. The primary literary device for achieving this "fulcrum" of critique can be classified beneath a rubric that I designate as the trope of the literary amateur. The trope of the literary amateur, by definition, interrogates the artificial exclusions that cordon off professional expertise into a postmodern compartmentalization of knowledge and power. Within this matrix, the female amateur--that technological denizen historically marked as the product rather than the producer of culture--becomes a significant operator of systems and signs rather than simply their representational vehicle or consumer. In other words, contemporary fictions of science exploit the disjunction between femininity and an "absolute" professional identity in order to make figures of the amateur bear the sign of literary marginalization and mobility: the emblem of literature's anti-professionalizing impulses.PhDEnglish Language and LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/105028/1/9624732.pdfDescription of 9624732.pdf : Restricted to UM users only