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´Walking the Möbius Strip´ locates Richard Powers´s fiction at the crossroads of postmodern and post-postmodern aesthetics and argues that this paradigm shift shapes the models of knowledge and understanding that underwrite his work. The readings of ´Plowing the Dark´, ´Galatea 2.2´, and ´The Echo Maker´ are inspired by Jacques Lacan´s image of cognition as a Möbius strip on which different forms of propositional and non-propositional knowledge bleed into and depend upon one another.

Drawing on feminist epistemology and psychoanalysis, this study highlights Powers´s interest in the non-propositional aspects of cognition, that is, in all that escapes the frameworks of scientific empiricism and can only be known through the mediation of fictional narrative. It reveals a deep dissatisfaction in the novels with the suggestion that knowledge and understanding must be objective and rational, and elucidates Powers´s idea that fiction can be a powerful tool for integrating various kinds of knowledge.

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