A Body of Individuals

<div> <div>Why are some versions of the collective we admired and desired while other versions are scorned and feared? <i>A Body of Individuals: The Paradox of Community in Contemporary Fiction</i> examines the conflict over the collective we through discourses of community. In the discourse of benevolent community community is a tool towards achieving healing productiveness and connection. In the discourse of dissenting community community that serves a function is simply another name for totalitarianism; instead community must merely be a fact of coexistence. What are the sources and the appeal of these irreconcilable views of community and how do they interact in contemporary fiction's attempt at imagining we?</div> <div> </div> <div>By engaging contemporary U.S. writers such as Toni Morrison Richard Powers Karen Tei Yamashita Lydia Davis Lynne Tillman and David Markson with theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy Giorgio Agamben François Lyotard Ernesto Laclau Louis Althusser Roland Barthes and Ludwig Wittgenstein this book reveals how the two conflicting discourses of community-benevolent and dissenting-are inextricably intertwined in various literary visions of we-we of the family of the world of the human and of coexistence.</div> <div> </div> <div>These literary visions demonstrate in a way that popular visions of community and postmodern theories of community cannot the dialectical relationship between the discourses of benevolent community and dissenting community. Sue-Im Lee argues that contemporary fiction's inability to resolve the paradox results in a model of ambivalent community one that offers unique insights into community and into the very notion of unity.</div> <div> </div> <div> </div> </div>