Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo

Digital and electronic technologies that act as extensions of our bodies and minds are changing the way we live, think, act, and write. Some welcome these developments for bringing humans closer to unified consciousness and eternal life. Others worry invasive globalized technologies threaten to destroy the self and the world. Whether feared or desired, these innovations provoke emotions that have long fueled the religious imagination, suggesting the presence of a latent spirituality in an era mistakenly deemed secular and post-human. William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo are American authors who explore this phenomenon brilliantly in their work. Engaging each in conversation, Mark C. Taylor discusses their sophisticated representation of new media, communications, information, and virtual technologies and their transformative effects on the self and society. He focuses on Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Powers’s Plowing the Dark, Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and DeLillo’s Underworld, following the interplay of technology and religion in their narratives and their imagining of the transition from human to post-human states. Their challenging ideas and inventive styles reveal the fascinating ways religious interests impact emerging technologies and how, in turn, these technologies guide spiritual aspirations. To read these novels from this perspective is to see them and our world anew.