Richard Powers
Theses, Special Studies, and Books about Powers


 


 

BIOGRAPHY NOVELS ARTICLES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS RESOURCES

 

Books:

  • Birkerts, Sven et al., Powers Book. Tokyo: Misuzu Shobo Press, 2000. (ISBN:4-622-04516-8) Japanese collection of critical articles and excerpts on Powers's first six novels.
  • Dewey, Joseph. Understanding Richard Powers. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. (ISBN:1570034427) An installment in the publisher's series Understanding Contemporary American Literature.
  • Burn, Stphen J. and Peter Dempsey, editors. Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008. (ISBN: 978-1-56478-508-4) A collection of seventeen critical essays on Powers, including one by Powers himself.
    Table of contents:
    • Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey: Preface
    • Stephen J. Burn: Introduction
    • Part One: The Early Novels (1985-1993)
      • Anca Cristofovici: "August Sander and Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance"
      • Sven Birkerts: "Stepping into History: Prisoner's Dilemma"
      • Scott Hermanson: "Just behind the Billboard: The Instability of Prisoner's Dilemma"
      • Barry Lewis: "Thirty Two Short Paragrphas About The Gold Bug Variations"
      • Patti White: "The Rhetoric of the Genetic Post Card: Writing and Reading in The Gold Bug Variations"
      • Stephen J. Burn: "Richard Powers's Ghosts"
      • David Cowart: "Passionate Pathography: Narrative as Pharmakon in Operation Wandering Soul"
    • Part Two: The Later Novels (1995-2006)
      • Jon Adams: "The Sufficiency of Code: Galatea 2.2 and the Necessity of Embodiment"
      • Daniel C. Dennett: "Astride the Two Cultures: A Letter to Richard Powers, Updated"
      • Paul Maliszewski: "The Business of Gain"
      • Trey Strecker: "Powers World: Refuge and Reentry in Plowing the Dark"
      • Joseph Dewey: "Little Knots, Tied in the Clothing of Time: The Time of Our Singing as a Dual-Time Narrative"
      • Jenell Johnson: "To Find the Soul, it Is Necessary to Lose it: Neuroscience, Disability, and the Epigraph to The Echo Maker"
      • Joseph Tabbi: "Afterthoughts on The Echo Maker"
      • Charles B. Harris: "The Story of the Self: The Echo Maker and Neurological Realism"
    • Part Three: Powers in Perspective
      • Bruno Latour: "Powers of the Facsimile: A Turing Test on Science and Literature"
      • Carter Scholz: "Narrating Technology"
      • Richard Powers: "Making the Rounds"
    • Bibliography
    • Contributors
    • Index

Theses and Dissertations:

  • Benshetler, Britt Annalyse. Children, childhood, and children’s literature in Richard Powers’s Operation Wandering Soul. Thesis (M.A.). University of South Carolina, 2003. 42 leaves.
  • Clemmen, Yves W. A. Photographic Construct and Narrative Imagination: an Approach in Contemporary French and American Literatures. Dissertation (Ph.D.). Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994. Studies five French authors with a definite double life between literature and the world of photography: Claude Simon (writer and photographer), Herve Guibert (writer and photographer), Marguerite Duras (writer and film-maker), Michel Tournier (writer and photographer/ critic/ promoter, Anny Duperey (actress, writer and daughter of a photographer). Also examines two American postmodern novelists as counterpoints because of their more deliberately playful attitude towards the material: Richard Powers and John Hawkes.
  • Coburn, James D. Richard Powers and a Response to Postmodernism. Thesis (M.A.) Cleveland State University, 2002. 66 leaves.
  • Copeland, Anna Darden. Synthesizing Systems: the Work of Art and of Science in the Fiction of Richard Powers. Thesis (Ph.D.). Greensboro, NC: Univ. of North Carolina, 1995. 204 p.
  • Dragan, Richard V. Aesthetic science and the encyclopedic novels of Joyce, Pynchon, DeLillo, and Powers (James Joyce, Ireland, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers). (Ph.D.) City University of New York, 2006. 275 p. Abstract: This study examines the relationship of science and aesthetics in the fiction of four major novelists using a new analytic category: aesthetic science. An introductory chapter defines this term, situating it against traditional aesthetics and the encyclopedic novel. Aesthetic science argues that scientific matter can be adapted for new tropes and ideas of formal beauty. This study also speculates on the tastes of "common readers"; who have gradually accepted scientific ideas in fiction. [ ... ] Chapter Five looks at Powers' magnum opus, The Gold Bug Variations, and his other novels to demonstrate how biology, chaos theory, and other science appear in his fiction. The role of the amateur scientist is important for understanding this encyclopedic text. This chapter also examines how bodies are often depicted as limited and damaged within Powers' novels. The responses of readers from online reviews suggest that science has become acceptable for literature. A conclusion speculates on how aesthetic science might apply to other recent writers.
  • Ericson, Gwen Rossmiller. Contemporary cognition: Computers, consciousness, and self-definition in cognitive science and late 20th century fiction (Richard Powers, Poul Anderson, Don DeLillo, Susan Daitch, Neal Stephenson). Dissertation (Ph.D.) Saint Louis University, 2001.
  • Fox, Matt. Exploring posthuman development in the works of Richard Powers. Thesis (M.A.). Anchorage, Alaska: University of Alaska Anchorage, College of Arts and Sciences, 2004. 139 leaves.
  • Garrick, LeeAnn Cooper. Exploring Humanness In Nonhumans: The Cyborg In Contemporary Fiction (Richard Powers, Philip K. Dick, Ridley Scott, Andy and Larry Wachowski). Thesis (M.A.) University of Alaska Anchorage, 2001. 108 pp.
  • Grassian, Daniel Steven. Hybrid fictions: American literature in the Information Age. PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2002. 272 p. (ISBN 0-493-77536-6).  Examines American literature published in the 1990s by primarily Generation X American fiction writers (David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Neal Stephenson, William Vollmann, Sherman Alexie, Michele Serros, Douglas Coupland and Dave Eggers)
  • Hermanson, Scott Douglas. The Simulation of Nature: Contemporary American Fiction In an Environmental Context (Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, Mike Davis). Dissertation (Ph.D.) University of Cincinnati, 2001. 216 pp.
  • Janton, Emilie. Decoding and Encoding In Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2. Memoire de Maîtrise en littérature américaine, Université d'Orleans, 2001.
  • Janton, Emilie. Lire l'espace dans la fiction de Richard Powers. Memoire de DEA en littérature américaine, Université Paris 7, Denis Diderot, Institut Charles V, 2003.
  • Karnicky, Jeffrey. Communication Breakdown: Reading Postmodern Literature. Pennsylvania State University, 2001. Author's description: "This study situates postmodern literature at the intersection of literary studies, cultural studies and the classroom. The dissertation considers the institutional position of postmodern literary criticism and articulates an ethics of reading around writers including Susan Daitch, Irvine Welsh, David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers. Such an ethics strongly links carefully considers both the ways that readers respond to the otherness of literary texts and the ways that reading negotiates among social contexts." Chapter Three is entitled "The Gift of Nothing in Richard Powers." Karnicky's abstract can be found online at http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/j/jjk10/diss%20description.htm.
  • Kim, Ilgu. Limbs of life: literature of postmodern anthropomorphic technology and cosmology. Dissertation (Ph.D.) Texas Tech University, 2000.
  • Kress, David C. Cadent Silence: Technology, Figure, and Ethics in Contemporary Literature (Richard Powers, Kathy Acker, Richard Brautigan, William S. Burroughs, Russell Edson). Dissertation (Ph.D.) The Pennsylvania State University, 2001. 306 pp.
  • Kucharzewski, Jan Dominik, Capacity for Wonder: Connections, Transitions, and Continuities in the Novels of Richard Powers. Hausarbeit zur Erlangung des Grades Magister Atrium der Phiosophischen Fakultät der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, May, 2004. Matrikel-Nr. 1342929. 106 pp.
  • Laudadio, Nicholas Christian. Singing machines: Musical intelligences and human instruments in science fiction and film (Fred Wilcox, Richard Powers, Lloyd Biggle, Jr., Stanley Kubrick). Dissertation (Ph.D.). Buffalo, NY: State University of New York at Buffalo, 2005. 193 p.  The texts under investigation here-Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2, Lloyd Biggle, Jr.'s “The Tunesmith,” and Fred Wilcox's Forbidden Planet (particularly its accompanying electronic musical score by Bebe and Louis Barron)-all present a mechanical entity that makes possible (through musicality) a profound connection with its “users.” This connection tends to manifest itself as an empathic reaction, linking the mechanical and the organic and bridging larger evolutionary rifts in imagined futures.
  • Leone, Stephen J. Cybernetics and literature: Or, re-coding humanity (Thomas Pynchon, Stanislaw Lem, Richard Powers). (Ph.D.)  St. John's University, New York, 2006. 230 p. Abstract: This dissertation examines selected literary writers of the past 40 years who have used the philosophical developments posed by cybernetics to structure their fiction. Employing concepts such as mechanical feedback, intertextuality, and metaphor-making within a conceptual framework that tries to unite all elements of culture, science, and writing into a single mega-project, the cyber-writers examined in this study explore the philosophical and literary consequences of the union of the human and the machine. Although the writers I discuss here are not 'cybernetic engineers' in the sense of laboratory workers, these writers are indeed practitioners of the idea that ideas of technology have 'literary' origins in the same way that 'literature' feeds off developments in technology. In this sense, a literary author is a cybernetic engineer: a metaphor-making animal. In the first chapter, I give a brief overview of cybernetics and discuss the role of metaphor and textuality in shaping this science. I then turn to three significant literary authors of the cybernetic revolution, Thomas Pynchon, Stanislaw Lem, and Richard Powers, to demonstrate that the fiction of these writers employs cybernetic principles as their structuring logic.
  • Little, Michael Robert. Novel affirmations: defending literary culture in the fiction of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers. Dissertation (Ph.D.). Texas A&M University, 2004. (Citation online) This dissertation studies the fictional and non-fictional responses of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers to their felt anxieties about the vitality of literature in contemporary culture. The intangible nature of literature's social value marks the literary as an uneasy, contested, and defensive cultural site. At the same time, the significance of any given cultural artifact or medium, such as television, film, radio, or fiction, is in a continual state of flux.
  • Lynch, Lisa Lillian. American Miasmas: Epidemic Geographies in Twentieth Century American Literature and Culture (Sinclair Lewis, Sidney Howard, Richard Preston, Richard Powers, John Edgar Wideman). Dissertation (Ph.D.) Rutgers The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick, 2000. 276 pp.
  • Marsh, Kelly Ann. The Sensation Novel Then and Now (Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Dickens, A.S. Byatt, Graham Swift, Jane Smiley, Richard Powers). Dissertation (Ph.D.) The Pennsylvania State University, 1997. 245 pp.
  • Miklaucic, Shawn. From Ontology to Ethics: Postmodern Fiction, Ethical Frameworks and Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2. Thesis (M.S.) Illinois State University, 1997. 96 pp.
  • Pence, Jeffrey S. Trying to remember: technology, narrative, and memory in contemporary culture. Dissertation (Ph.D.) Temple University, 1998. Focuses on Galatea 2.2 and on William Gass's The Tunnel.
  • Rosha, Rekha. In the counting-house of language: Accounting, capitalism, and American identity, 1782--2000. (Ph.D.) Brandeis University, 2006. Abstract: 'In the Counting-house of Literature: Accounting, Capitalism, and American Identity, 1782--2000' seeks to explain the role of accounting, what Karl Marx refers to as the 'nominal shape' of capital, in American literature. Elaborating a specifically national explanation of mystification, Max Weber defines capitalism as an economic system underwritten by the narrative that rationalizes capital. From this perspective I consider the emergence and development of American literature in the context of the concomitant ascendance of a nationally-based account of capital as two narrative forms that try to track events and values. Spanning the periods of agrarianism, mercantilism, slavery, industrialism, regulatory and late capitalism, I analyze the dense interplay between the account book and the literary book through close readings of six texts representative of these periods: J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, Benjamin Franklin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, William Faulkner, and Richard Powers. [ ... ] It is from a similar perspective that Powers questions the prospects for repayment as American history has become, for him, indistinguishable from its economic history. This project revises conventional understandings of the connections between economic and cultural formations of American identity to argue that American literature is coined within the nation's counting-house.
  • Ruberto, Charles Gregory. Technologies of the self (Richard Powers, Neal Stephenson, David Foster Wallace). Dissertation (Ph.D.) Harvard University, 2000.
  • Sander, Mark Alan. Phylum machinica: Narratives of anorganic life in contemporary science, philosophy, and American fiction (William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers). PhD. University of California, Los Angeles, 2003. 329 pp. Advisor: Hayles, N. Katherine.
  • Snyder, Sharon Lynn. 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. Diss. (Ph.D.) University of Michigan, 1995. 246 p.
  • Strecker, William. Ecologies of Knowledge: Narrative Ecology in Contemporary American Fiction. Thesis (Ph. D.) Ball State University, 2000. Discusses three works: Gold Bug Variations, Bob Shacochis's Swimming in the Volcano, and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
  • Thomas, J. D. Toward a "hybrid fiction": spirituality in the novels of Richard Powers.. Thesis (M.A.)--University of South Carolina, 2006.
  • Thurman, Alexander. Simultaneous diversity: Discontinuity, entanglement, and contemporary American fiction (Bruno Latour, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Powers, Anthony Giddens). Dissertation (Ph.D.) New York University, 2000. 283 p.
  • Zuelke, Karl William, Speaking a Word for Nature: Representations of Nature and Culture in Four Genres Of American Environmental Writing. Diss. (Ph.D.) University of Cincinnati, 2003.  199 p.

 

Special Editions of Periodicals:

  • O'Brien, John, ed. The Review of contemporary fiction : Richard Powers, Rikki Ducornet. Normal, IL: Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1998. 281 p. (Published as Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 18, no. 3) (ISBN: 1564781925 (pbk.)) Includes the following pieces (each referenced individually in this bibliography): "Dirtying our hands: an introduction to the fiction of Richard Powers" by Jim Neilson; "An interview with Richard Powers" by Jim Neilson; "Narrative Powers : Richard Powers as storyteller" by James Hurt; "The storm of progress: Richard Powers's Three farmers" by Greg Dawes; "Hooking the nose of the leviathan: information, knowledge, and the mysteries of bonding in The gold bug variations" by Joseph Dewey; "Ecologies of knowledge: the encyclopedic narratives of Richard Powers and his contemporaries" by Trey Strecker; "'The wheel's worst illusion": the spatial politics of Operation wandering soul" by Ann Pancake; "The gender of genius: scientific experts and literary amateurs in the fiction of Richard Powers" by Sharon Snyder; "'The stereo view": politics and the role of the reader in Gain" by Charles B. Harris; "A Richard Powers checklist." For order info see the web at http://www.centerforbookculture.org/review/98_3.html.
  • "DIE GOLD BUG VARIATIONEN: Richard Powers, Johann Sebastian Bach und die DNA." A series of essays in Schreibheft, Zeitschrift für Literatur. 56 (Mai 2001). Includes the following excerpts and essays:
    • Powers, Richard. "Arie: Der Ewige Kalendar." excerpt from GBV.
    • Graf, Guido. "The Finger on the Trigger for the Years to Come: Richard Powers’ ’The Gold Bug Variations'."
    • Powers, Richard. "Kapitel IX, Auszuge."
    • Powers, Richard and Bradford Morrow. "Das neu erfundene Buch: Ein Dialog."
    • Powers, Richard. "Kapitel XXI, Auszuge."
    • Schmitt, Michael. "Richard Powers: Ein Portrat." p. 89-92.
    • Powers, Richard. "Sein und Schein: Zur Technologie der Darstellung."
 

 

BIOGRAPHY NOVELS ARTICLES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS RESOURCES

 

By David G. Dodd

Copyright 1997-2008 David Dodd.
This is a work in progress.
Any additions, corrections, etc. are more than welcome. Email David Dodd at david.g.dodd at gmail dot com

Last updated: 8/18/08