|
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.
- Richard Powers: Operational Wondering. Berlin: mono.kultur, (#12) June and July 2007. 31 p.
Caroline Muntendorf, Interview; Renko Heuer, Introduction; Heinz Ickstadt, Epilogue; Kai von Rabenau, Portrait; Ute Kuhn, Design and Illustration. In English. Includes a long interview with Powers, touching on his biography, influences, and writing technique. Cover.
- 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
- Lee, Sue-Im. A Body of Individuals. The Paradox of Community in Contemporary Fiction,. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009, 196 p. (ISBN 978-0-8142-0407-8)
From the Summary: "Why are some versions of the collective "we" admired and desired while other versions are scorned and feared? A Body of Individuals: The Paradox of Community in Contemporary Fiction 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"?
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."
- Kucharzewski, Jan D. Propositions about Life: Reengaging Literature and Science. Germany: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011, 491 p. (ISBN 978-3825359010)
Publisher's summary: ‘Propositions about Life: Reengaging Literature and Science’ takes a fresh look at the difficulties that arise in any attempt to integrate the disciplines of natural sciences and literature. The study develops a historically inflected discussion of the sometimes cooperative, sometimes contested relationship between literature and science in Great Britain and the United States of America. A critical analysis of the most important methodologies and conflicts that have emerged in the field of ‘Literature and Science’ demonstrates how both disciplines rely on diverging assumptions about the material world that are not as incongruent as they might appear to be. Reading the novels of the contemporary American writer Richard Powers as junctions between literary and scientific investigations, ‘Propositions about Life’ furthermore suggests that the question of textual referentiality in literary studies can profit from an interdisciplinary perspective without yielding to a naive concept of mimesis.
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.
- Cagle, Jeremy. Elegant complexity: The presence of Cold War game theory in postmodern American fiction. Dissertation (Ph.D.), University of South Carolina, 2010, 280 pages. Abstract: This study reconsiders the legacy of the Cold War in postmodern American fiction by combining readings of postwar literature and the cultural and historical narrative of game theory. Recently described by Steven Belletto as an under-examined cultural narrative that promised "scientific redemption" during the Cold War, game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that originated in 1944, with John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's publication of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. In this dissertation, I illustrate a variety of rhetorical strategies that resist the profoundly dehumanizing effects of Cold War game theory--a theoretical apparatus rigidly applied to military and diplomatic policy throughout the postwar era. Complementing recent scholars, my project establishes the manner in which American postmodern authors, engaging in textual subversion of hegemonic discourses, reaffirm a vision of human agency. Read against a history of popular representations of game theory in the U.S., the writers of this study demonstrate how game-theoretic logic and language prioritize conflict and competition, thereby crippling prospects for collective social action. In "Game" (1965), End Zone (1972), Don Quixote (1986), Prisoner's Dilemma (1988), Infinite Jest (1996), and No Country for Old Men (2005) these authors interrogate the ethics and efficacy of deterministic models of behavior, and ultimately renounce the perfect rationality that underwrites Cold War Manichean ideology.
- Clare, Ralph Elliot. Fictions Ltd.: Representations of corporations in post-World War II American fiction and film. Dissertation (Ph.D.), State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2010, 395 pages. Abstract: My project explores the still emerging late-capitalist world-system through American literary, filmic, and pop cultural representations of one of its primary motors, the multinational corporation. Having expanded in size, scope, and power to an unprecedented degree in our neoliberal capitalist era, the corporation, with its long-time legal status as a "fictional person," constitutes an embodiment of capital, with the tangible material result of the corporate body appearing to trump the (post) human's.
The corporations represented in the various texts discussed--novels by Frank Norris, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, Richard Powers, and Joshua Ferris; dramas like Executive Suite, Network, and Michael Clayton; comedies like Ghotsbusters, Gung Ho, and The Office--function as temporalized, if temporary, figures for the immateriality of capital. As such, they crystallize an economic system far too complex and dizzying to comprehend in and of itself. At the same time, these representations function as sites wherein the economic concerns, crises, and fears prevalent at the moment of their cultural production are cast and recast, thereby both affecting and being affected by the economic discourses of their eras.
Taken collectively, these Post-World War II corporate fictions balance cultural critiques of a capitalism deemed "too big to fail" (as evidenced, for example, in the railroads, pharmaceutical, and automobile industries) against the possibilities of resistance to a system in whose endgame we now all appear to be participating. A study of them reveals, on the one hand, the dissolution of once-great American Industries, the withering of labor power, the disappearance of blue-collar jobs, the decenteredness of capital, the corruption of supposedly democratic institutions, and the financialization of everyday life that signals the first translations of biopower into a veritable bioeconomy. These suggest the declining or shrinking spaces of resistance for subjects. On the other hand, the study reveals the continuing resistance of the subject amidst the deterritorializations and reterritorializations of capital and its corporate bodies.
- 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.
- Deitering, Cynthia. Waste sites: Rethinking nature, body, and home in American fiction since 1980.
Dissertation (Ph.D.), State University of New York at Binghamton, 2008, 135 pages.
- 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. Abstract: This thesis explores posthuman identity in two works of
speculative fiction by Richard Powers: Galatea 2.2 and Plowing the Dark
. Both novels depict specific examples of the posthuman condition,
namely artificial intelligence and virtual reality. My reading of the
novels involve applying aspects of cyborg theory, along with feminism
and postructuralism. Specifically, I focus on the development of
subjectivity in its relationship to technology. Technology comes into
play in these novels in the shaping of identities and the
(re)configuration of bodies. In my analysis of Galatea 2.2, I look at
the development of identity taking shape in the form of artificial
intelligence. In the analysis of Plowing the Dark, I explore the
dynamics of virtual reality and the role its technology has on the user
as being situated within a virtual ecology. Virtual technology serves
as a means, then, to (re)examine humanist notions of epistemology and
ontology. The novels exemplify a posthuman moment where an overall
epistemic and ontological shift occurs, where humanist concepts come
under new inquiry.
- Garrick, LeeAnn Cooper. Exploring
Humanness In Nonhumans: The Cyborg In Contemporary Fiction
(Richard Powers, Philip K. Dick, Ridley Scott, Andy and Larry
Wachowski). M.A. University of Alaska Anchorage, 2001. 108
p. Abstract: The portrayal of the cyborg in contemporary fiction has
charged an investigation by literary scholars to determine the ways the
cyborg represents technology in postmodernism. More importantly, the
depiction of cyborgs in fiction causes readers and viewers to
reevaluate what they "count" as human. The work of Jean Baudrillard, N.
Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, and Marie-Laure Ryan suggests that
speculative images of the cyborg represent the engagement of human
beings and technology in postmodern society and beyond; their work also
points to alternative ways of defining what it means to be human. This
study examines the variations of the cyborg by investigating its
portrayal in technologically infused contemporary film and literature:
Richard Powers' novel Galatea 2.2, Phillip K. Dick's novel Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ridley Scott's director's cut of the film
Blade Runner, and the Wachowski brothers' film The Matrix.
- Grassian, Daniel Steven.
Hybrid fictions: American literature in the Information Age. Ph.D.
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). Ph.D. University of Cincinnati, 2001. 216 p. Advisory: Tom LeClair. Abstract: The dissertation is an examination of how nature is socially constructed in particular texts of contemporary American
Fiction. In discussing the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers,
and Jonathan Franzen, and the non-fiction of Mike Davis, I argue that
their works accurately depict how nature is created because they
recognize the idea of nature as a textual artifact. Fully aware of
their textual limitations, these works acknowledge and foreground the
ontological uncertainty present in their writing, embracing postmodern
literary techniques to challenge the notion that "nature" is a
tangible, stable, self-evident reality. They embrace the fictionality
of language, admitting that any textual enterprise can only aspire to
simulation.
The dissertation begins by exploring the simulated nature
of Walt Disney's Animal Kingdom. In the hyperreality of the theme park,
we can see that Disney's simulation of exotic nature reflects a reality
defined by media images, myriad details that signify nature but never
seem to equate to nature. Pynchon's Mason & Dixon explores the
eighteenth-century border conflict between the age of miracles and the
age of reason, a critique of the Enlightenment as seen from its
crumbling twenty-first century edges. Franzen's Strong Motion mines
similar territory as the novel reveals the deeply buried foundation on
which we've structured our lives, a foundation that confines us to
categories and hierarchies based on domination. Powers's Gain uses the
intertwined narratives of the growth of a corporation and the death of
a middle-aged mother to dramatize the reduction of all reality to an
equation designed to maximize profit. Finally, Mike Davis's two books
about Los Angeles suggest the apocalyptic future of nature. His Los
Angeles is a postmodern world of chaos, non-linearity and fractal
borders, a work of natural history depicted through the aesthetic lens
of postmodernist fiction.
These eco-novelists are aware that reality becomes a
matter of differing and competing worldviews. Underlying their concern
with language and its ability to represent reality is an awareness that
there is a nature that exists beyond language. Unlike most of their
contemporaries, however, they refuse the illusion of defining a one,
true nature.
- Hong, Rebecca. Contesting Cold War narratives: Argentine, Cuban, and
United States fiction (Leopoldo Marechal, Reinaldo Arenas, Richard Powers, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth). Ph.D. Cornell University, 2005. 233 p. Advisor: Debra Ann Castillo. (ISBN: 0-496-97184-0). Abstract: This study offers a cultural analysis of Cold War
hemispheric history through post-1945 novels. The primary question
raised is, How have fictional texts negotiated the ideological
narratives of the Cold War to offer alternative visions of historical
development? The chapters that follow illuminate the related processes
of literary creation and historical narration through analyzing the
works of Leopoldo Marechal, Reinaldo Arenas, Richard Powers, Don
DeLillo, and Philip Roth. Novels are grouped not by nation, but by
common historical themes, in order to stress the convergence of trends
and concerns across borders. Each novel powerfully reconstructs three
historical moments: (1) postwar promise; (2) revolutionary
disillusionment; and (3) millennial post-Cold War disorientation. Each
challenges the validity of dominant ideological narratives that
attended each of these moments, registered in the naturalized accounts
of economic and cultural modernization; in the domestic allegory and
gendering of the nation; and in the militarized scripting of conflict
and triumph. The structures of Latin American neo-colonialism, United
States global dominance, and late capitalism's blurring of cultural
borders work to obscure the common political motives behind these
texts. To combat this obfuscation, the author employs a trans-American
comparative literary method to reveal the confluences in fictional
challenges to Cold War dominant histories around the Americas. The
final chapter examines the disciplinary structures that both grew out
of and sustained the Cold War, and proposes a reconsideration of
knowledge production and literary analysis in a post-Cold War era.
Ultimately, this study shows that despite the challenges of uneven
development of printing industries, literary distribution, and
marketing, novels around the Americas retain a dissenting historical
and political function in an era in which print culture has been
substantially displaced by media and consumer culture.
- 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.
- Kauffman, Krysthol. The post-Freudian casebook neuronovel.
Thesis (M.A.) Northern Michigan University, 2010. Includes Powers in a discussion of Echo Maker along with DeLillo's White Noise and Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn.
- 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). Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University, 2001. 306 p. Advisor: Jeffrey Nealon. Abstract: This study examines how five American authors have
responded to the problem of technology. The frame for the examination
comes from Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology," which
argues that the prime danger for "our" era is our inability to have a
true relation to technology: we can only affirm it, deny it,
or--worst of all--take up various neutral responses to
technology. This ushers in the danger for our era because we remain
chained to a technological world picture, which in turn both projects
and forecloses the future. And given a world picture always-already
spoken for, silence itself--and whatever it
produces--likewise remains foreclosed. Thus, the study asks
whether contemporary American literature performs an ethical response
to technology, one that stands off from the future and silence. Put
another way, this study asks whether or not it is possible to write
(about) silence, so that silence is not foreclosed by technology.
To answer these questions, I examine how certain writers
have figured responses to technology through affirmation, denial,
neutrality, and through another concept which I come to call the neuter
or cadence: Richard Powers' use of chaos theory metaphorically affirms
a technological world view; Kathy Acker's cyborg denial of technology
forms metonymic substitutions that replicate the technological world
view; Richard Brautigan attempts to remain optimistically neutral
towards technology by simply machining it away into total loss, but
this "loss" ultimately allows technology to continue unhindered;
William S. Burroughs works chance through a negative neutrality towards
an apocalyptic silence, but--worst of all--this neutrality
actually fuels the holocaust potential of unchecked technology;
finally, I suggest that Russell Edson's sense of the silent,
unavailable-yet-operative "non-human" measures a neuter, ethical
response to technology.
In short, this study strives to suggest not another
possibility for science and technology but "another" figure for
revealing--not a figure which determines in advance a future, but
rather a falling, a cadence, a tendency to form processes in which the
future and silence operate: it attempts to allow an ethics to emerge as
a silence that is not available as an alternative to technology, but as
a neuter operative within technology.
- 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.
- Leppard, Natalie Rae. Finding the pen in a pile of grenades: Postmodern
American literature, a spectacular definition of terrorism, and the response to 9/11. Ph.D. University of South Carolina, 2007. 257 p. (ISBN: 978-0-549-21023-8). Abstract: Before any literature could be examined for this study, a definition of terrorism had to be considered. While innumerable texts
on terrorism are in print, most are political, sociological, or
criminological studies of the phenomenon. The few texts on terrorism in
literature that are available are not current enough to address the
issue post-9/11. A working definition of terrorism is provided, which
is a problematic term for many reasons including the recent
proliferation of the word. I am not interested in actual terrorist
events depicted (I will not examine terrorist groups in Greece while
analyzing The Names); I examine, through various theoretical lenses
provided by theorists like Derrida and Baudrillard, how the acts are
depicted and how, within the context of the world of literature, they
function. This first half focuses on works by Don DeLillo ("The
Uniforms," Players, The Names, Mao II), Paul Auster's Leviathan, and
Richard Powers's Plowing the Dark--DeLillo acting as the father of
postmodern literary terrorism and Auster and Powers the second
generation. These texts provide a basis for examining the literature
called into existence by 9/11, and that assessment comprises the second
half of the study. For the 9/11 influenced texts, I place more emphasis
on the actual terrorist event as a creator of the texts but with weight
on its literary consequences. This second half provides an
investigation of how a recent terrorist event--recent history's
supreme terrorist event--impacts the creative community in terms
of texts in which the generative themes of pre-9/11 texts come to
art-imitative life. Don DeLillo's Falling Man , Jonathan Safran Foer's
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Ken Kalfus's A Disorder Peculiar
to the Country , and John Barth's The Book of Ten Nights and a Night:
Eleven Stories are examined with references to other current works that
mention or feature 9/11. The division between pre- and post-9/11 texts
facilitates a continuing dialogue between an older generation of
authors and a newer generation, both of which have welcomed the era of
twenty-first century literature, as well as beginning a textual
dialogue between authors and the theorists who have written 9/11.
- Lidstone, Anna. Living in fictitious times: Habits of thinking about time
in narrative and its theory. Ph.D. University of Toronto, 2007. 275 p. (ISBN: 978-0-494-27954-0). Abstract: Contemporary studies of literary narrative have placed
considerable emphasis on categories of temporality and the discursive
use of non-linearity as a predominant feature of narrative's unique
characteristics. This thesis argues that discussion of narrative
temporality is built upon an assumption that time, is in, fact, linear.
I argue that time is frequently essentialized and universalized within
contemporary literary criticism and suggest that temporality discourses
are steeped in history and ideology, leaving time as one of the few
metanarratives still largely unexamined within literary studies.
Using an inter-disciplinary approach to examine the
intersections of time and power, I read six novels of the past
twenty-five years which take temporality as a central theme (Ian
McEwan's The Child in Time; Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye; Richard
Powers' The Time of Our Singing; Audrey Niffenegger's The Time
Traveler's Wife; Janet Frame's The Carpathians; and Jeanette
Winterson's The PowerBook) by way of exploring the possible
implications of this metanarrative. First, I argue that narratological
terminology is far more embedded within assumptions of temporality than
is often recognized. Secondly, I argue that temporality is implicated
within structures of power and ideology, affecting what it is possible
for us to "imagine." Finally, I extend my argument to the wider sphere
of narrative's influence on concepts of knowledge across disciplinary
boundaries, by way of highlighting the limitations of the linear
world-view assumed by narrative theory.
- 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). 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.
- Miller, Christopher Hill. Exile and recuperation in the postmodern novel. Ph.D. University of South Carolina, 2004. Advisor: Professor David Cowart. (ISBN: 0-496-89599-0). Abstract: This study examines plots of exile in the postmodern
novels of Don DeLillo, Walter Abish, Kathy Acker, Michael Ondaatje,
Richard Powers, William Gibson, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat,
Chang-rae Lee, and in the autobiographies of Judith Ortiz Cofer, Maxine
Hong Kingston, and Le Ly Hayslip. The postmodern story of exile is ever
more figurative and idiosyncratic than its ancient, medieval, and
Renaissance precursors. Postmodern exiles are marginalized characters
whose recuperative quests to return home are figurative and directed
toward purely emotional planes of experience such as love. These quests
are problematized as a drive to recover something originally
unconstructed that is always already reconstructed in the continuous
permutations of memory and desire. In most exilic texts the essentially
emotional recuperative quest is accompanied by another, this time an
intellectual quest mediated by language, culture, time, and place. The
emotional exiles and recuperations depict the raw impulse toward
recuperation while the attempted intellectual recoveries illustrate the
intrinsic, textual impossibility of those efforts. Other features
distinguish the postmodern novel's exilic paradigm. The postmodern
version employs intertextuality, reconfiguring intertexts as foils or
subverting them entirely to politicize and write against them. When the
novel's exilic paradigm is oriented toward nations and cultures, it
critiques those hegemonies. Amidst such critiques, the postmodern
exilic novel examines imperialism, colonialism, and other forms of
repression, and it also presents the problematics of acculturation and
assimilation. Finally, postmodern exilic novels are filled with points
of indeterminacy, requiring readers to infer or reconstruct parts of
the narrative. Thus the reader's engagement with the text mirrors the
recuperations foiled by textuality in one form or another and
foregrounds the problematics of memory vis-à-vis the real. This exilic
paradigm also appears in the memoirs of women émigrés. Such
autobiography emphasizes the cultural dislocation of exile, a condition
compounded by the authors' gender. Figuratively exiled in their
patriarchal homelands because of their gender, they are doubly so in
emigration. Nonetheless they integrate components of their pasts, their
heritage, with their lives and identities in the present.
- Muth, Katie Ruth. After: U.S. literary culture, 1989--present. Dissertation (Ph.D.), Washington University in St. Louis, 2010, 330 pages.
- Nadir, Christine. Sacrifice and its discontents: Ethical paradox in twentieth and twenty-first century environmental writing. Dissertation (Ph.D.), Columbia University, 2009, 268 pages. Abstract: This project examines the role of sacrifice in twentieth-century environmental writing, a recurring figure that has been much celebrated and sometimes maligned but never critically studied. Calls for individuals to give up high standards of living abound in discussions of ecological sustainability: consume less, live simply, go back to the land, and environmental problems from aquifer depletion to air pollution and global climate change will be mitigated. While eco-critics tend to understand this story in realist terms, as an ethico-political model for readers to emulate, this dissertation studies writers for whom it represents a troubling paradox rather than a straightforward solution. In the works I discuss, the impulse to sacrifice is wrapped up in the desire to escape the ruinous entanglements of modernity and to rehabilitate a more "natural" way of life, yet attempts to create pastoral spaces at a remove from modernization processes subtly betray themselves. Willa Cather's simple-lifers enjoy blissful communion with nature but occupy their texts as ineffectual ghosts from a bygone era. Marge Piercy's and Ursula Le Guin's eco-utopias attain the appearance of primitivist sustainability only by concealing their reliance on sophisticated technologies and disciplinary institutions. Richard Powers' ecocritics are selfless martyrs and his eco-activists, stereotypes of themselves, predictable and redundant. In nonfiction texts, such as nature writing, activist blogs, and "green" consumer guides, social- or self-denial continues to appear ambivalently, failing outright or leading to unexpected excesses. My object is to show that these failures are far from unproductive. In these environmental literary works, performances of sacrifice are bound up with an unresolved tension--the tension between the instinct to flee from modernity and the tacit recognition that environmental ethics must negotiate with its contemporary social, political, and economic structures. I argue that, while ostensibly oriented toward an idealized, simpler past, these works gesture toward sacrifice's undoing, inchoately rethinking the traditional antagonism between environmentalism and modern life. This dissertation makes the case that literature has a crucial contribution to make to the imagination of ecological modernities--or, nonprimitive sustainability--a concept that has been defined, until now, by industry and the social and natural sciences.
- 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.
- Reher, Meike. Die Darstellung von Musik im zeitgenössischen englischen und amerikanischen Bildungsroman : Peter Ackroyd, Vikram Seth, Richard Powers, Frank Conroy, Paul Auster. Dissertation (Ph.D.) Frankfurt am Main, 2010.
- 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. Abtract: This dissertation investigates the topos of the machinic phylum in several scientific, philosophical, and literary texts
produced in the second half of the twentieth century. The philosopher
Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari may have coined the
phrase machinic phylum, but this study demonstrates a widespread
cultural fascination with the notion, which is characterized by a fully
immanent or "machinic" explanation of the phenomena of life and a
conceptualization of a variety of simple replicating and evolving
machine-like parasites that both construct and exploit the human body
and mind. Made possible by an emergent cybernetic paradigm in the
biological sciences, the figure of the machinic phylum functions as one
mode in which scientists, philosophers, and novelists explore a new,
posthuman concept of subjectivity that would seem to revise the liberal
humanist model. Taking Immanuel Kant's theory of the transcendental
subject as the baseline for comparison, this dissertation argues that
the machinic phylum constitutes what Walter Benjamin calls a
"dialectical image" of the historical transition from the humanist to a
posthuman concept of the subject. The discourse of the machinic phylum,
thus, often subtly reinscribes the assumptions and prejudices of
liberal humanism in the machinic parasites it describes.
While its excursuses engage in an extended critique of
the machinic phylum's philosophical underpinnings by contrasting three
central ideas in Deleuze's work with corresponding notions drawn from
Benjamin's philosophy of history, this study also considers, in each of
its three sections, how the theory of the machinic phylum promises but
ultimately fails to reconfigure the model of subjectivity that Kant
elaborated in his three Critiques. The first section assesses the
theory of the machinic phylum's impact on the ontology of the subject
by examining selfish gene and meme theories and William S. Burroughs
Nova trilogy. Considering the machinic phylum's effect on the subject's
status as a desiring agent, the second section analyzes deep ecology
and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon. The dissertation's final section
investigates the extent to which the theory of the machinic phylum
alters the subject as a feeling entity by investigating Artificial Life
research and Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations.
- Shonkwiler, Alison R. The financial imaginary: Dreiser, DeLillo, and abstract capitalism in American literature. Ph.D. Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey - New
Brunswick, 2007. 221 p. Advisor: Marianne DeKoven. (ISBN: 978-0-549-69989-7). Abstract: This dissertation examines the representation of capitalism as an abstract phenomenon in American literature at the beginning and end of the "long" twentieth century. Comparing the two most recent ends-of-century--both notorious for the promotion of "new" economic rules and extremes of wealth redistribution--allows us to chart writers' efforts to find formal strategies adequate to represent changing conditions of economic abstraction. Reading fictions
from the period of the American "economic novel" from 1885 to 1912 by
William Dean Howells, Henry James, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser,
and from contemporary narratives of "late" capitalism from 1998 to 2003
by Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, Jane Smiley, and David Denby, I show
how texts from these two turns-of-century pose a question of parallel
historical urgency: how to find new ways of seeing forces of capitalism
that are thought to exceed conventional narrative powers of
representation.
The financial imaginary thus invites us to consider the
novel's attempts--and its failures--to make late capitalism
legible in realist terms. I consider how these texts historicize a
particular view of late capital as able to evolve beyond its origins as
"real" money and toward new levels of financial immateriality.
Exploring the ways in which the representation of capital is
reconceived in literature as a problem of historical perception and
understanding rather than as an account of a system of material
production, I argue that the "financialization" of the novel's
imagination--an expansive projection of cause and effect through
the abstract terms of the market--is a literary expression of and
a response to the market's seeming ability to exceed social control.
Just as late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts seek to
define historically viable modes of financial selfhood, late-twentieth-
and early-twenty-first-century texts allow us to track the ways that
contemporary narrative returns to the preoccupations of the
nineteenth-century economic novel even as it models the inadequacies of
such fiction to tell the story of twentieth-century capitalism.
- 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.
- Tedder, Charles. Utopian discourse: Identity, ethnicity, and community in post-Cold War American narrative. Dissertation (Ph.D.), The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2010, 278 p.
Abstract: This dissertation analyzes critical utopian discourse in nine American novelists, making the claim that in American literature, at least, we have of necessity entered a postethnic stage of the communal imagination. Beginning with theories of utopia offered by Mannheim, Ricoeur, Bloch, Moylan, and Jameson, this study claims, in its introduction, that a thoroughgoing critical utopia must rethink whose ideals count as the ideal toward which we all should work. Collectively raised by Werner Sollors, David Hollinger, Giles Gunn, and Caroline Rody, the problems of identity and solidarity call our attention to the urgency of interethnic or, differently, postethnic cooperation. Some principles for such cooperation are here outlined with the help of Elaine Scarry, Jean-Luc Nancy, Judith Butler, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. The three main parts of this study are organized along a temporal axis. Part one traces the critical reimagining of the past in novels by Tony Morrison, Philip Roth, and Leslie Marmon Silko; part two charts imaginative "present" cartography in novels by Michael Chabon, Richard Powers, and Gerald Vizenor; part three turns to future-writing and the prophetic voice in novels by Octavia Butler, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Throughout, it is argued that, due to contemporary socio-demographic and ecological dynamics, we can no longer productively imagine our ideal worlds in the interests of only one, particular community. The afterword concludes postethnic utopias urge a recursive, compassionate, and critical imagination that helps human beings tend to everyday and long-term tasks "ecosocially" as members of a broadly inclusive community.
- 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. Ph.D. University of Cincinnati, 2003. 199 p. Advisor: Tom LeClair. Abstract: Speaking a Word for Nature is an ecocritical analysis of
four works of contemporary American literature, representative of four
different genres: Peter Matthiessen's At Play in the Fields of the
Lord, Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge, David Quammen's The Song of the
Dodo, and Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations . The texts
foreground nature and explore humankind's relationship with nature.
Each seeks to reconcile or deconstruct the perceived opposition of
nature and culture in order to reimagine humankind in relation to
nature. These texts also have a political component in common. They
reconceive nature in an effort to modify human behavior toward it, so
that the welfare of the natural world, and the welfare of disempowered
human groupswomen and Native Americans in particular, who have
historically been aligned with nature--may be taken more into
account in everyday human affairs.
In service to a combined ecocritical and formalist
inquiry, the dissertation also draws upon ecofeminist theory and the
philosophy of science. The analysis of At Play in the Fields of the
Lord demonstrates how the main character, Lewis Moon, acts upon
essentialist conceptions of Native Americans, which eventually brings
about the destruction of the indigenous tribe who adopts him. Refuge
refers to essentialist conceptions of women and nature, but uses them
in a rhetorical strategy that simultaneously reintegrates natural and
human realms and challenges patriarchal notions that commodify nature.
The Song of the Dodo examines the role of text in the translation of
science to a popular audience. The Gold Bug Variations demonstrates how
natural and cultural systems, at their fundamental levels, are
variations on a universal, unifying pattern.
While these works are products of different genres, the
common ground from which they arise tends to blur their differences.
The discursive, non-fiction texts establish themselves as self-defining
works of art, and the fictional texts develop formal correspondences
with the natural world. Taken together, they form a coherent commentary
on the corrosive effect of human society's treatment of the natural
world, and they suggest new ways of conceiving nature that may enhance
the value that human societies place on it.
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."
- Pellegrin, Jean-Yves (ed). Opening Perspectives. Six Essays on Richard Powers. in Transatlantica: American Studies Journal. 2:2009 (July-Dec. 2009) (ISSN 1765-2766)
Contents:
|
