Nothing Risked, Nothing Gained: Richard Powers' Gain and the Horizon of Risk

• Main Author: Aaron Jaffe
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association Française d'Etudes Américaines 2010-02-01
• Series: Transatlantica : Revue d'Études Américaines
• Subjects: Risk Society; second modernity; Soap; Ulrich Beck
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/4632

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.