Richard Powers

"This paper explores the dialectics of authenticity and hybridity – two concepts that tend to be theoretically conceived in terms of mutual exclusion, while fictional texts have for quite some time started to enact them as analogous and compatible ideas. With respect to two recent novels, Richard Powers' The Time of Our Singing and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, I would like to show that hybridity these days can very well be employed to elicit an aura of authenticity, rather than conveying ironical distance, subversion or disruptive metafictional self-reflection.
Both novels stem from the realm of what has been called neo-realist fiction and both of them run counter to Jonathan Franzen's diagnosis of a contemporary literary market in which a naïve understanding of cultural identity rules supreme. After all, Powers and Lethem are white authors which capitalize on the subject of race. While both novels trace issues of identity and identification which have their origin in the structures of racial ascriptions and self-fashionings, they give a markedly new and critical slant to the mechanisms of testimonial identity politics which Franzen demarcated, without falling back on long-standing postmodern techniques of ironic distancing and de-authentication.
"

Houser’s essay argues for the centrality of sickness and affect to twenty-first-century environmental consciousness and therefore to ecocriticism, through an analysis of Richard Powers’s novel, The Echo Maker. The essay focuses on wonder, an essential affect for promoting environmental investment and scientific interest. In line with much environmental writing, the novel aspires to increase readers’ awareness of their surroundings as a way to promote ecological protection. However, it also rethinks the trajectories of wonder under the pressures of neurological injury. The novel presents the oscillation between familiarity and strangeness as the mechanism of wonder, both in the brain and in narrative, and performs wonder by taking readers through a series of dialectics that aim to defamiliarize the everyday. The Echo Maker’s narrative complexity uncovers the obverse of wonder—projection and paranoia—and demonstrates how affect can derail ethical energies. Houser’s essay builds a multidisciplinary account of wonder and its stakes for environmental thought by analyzing the novel’s doubled narration, key texts of environmentalism, neuroscientific studies, and affect theory. It argues that Powers’s novel of eco-sickness is a rejoinder to platitudes about connection, awareness, and care that poses the question: Can ethical concern and care for human and nonhuman others take hold without connection?

This paper analyses the way Richard Powers portrays plant life in his 2018 novel The Overstory. Unlike in traditional literary depictions of botany, trees are presented as actors and not passive objects. By undermining the mind/ matter, human/nonhuman distinctions Powers reduces the gap separating his human protagonists and trees. The latter have agency, intentionality and the ability to communicate. Powers also attempts to find a new way to give his vegetal life voice. Instead of anthropomorphizing them, plants talk in their own material way. This paper draws from posthumanist writings by, among others, Donna Haraway Anna Tsing, Lowenhaupt, Mark Jackson, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and also from Michael Marder’s and Serpil Opperman’s ideas on plant language and storytelling.

This chapter offers an overview and theorization of the strand in contemporary American fiction I have dubbed the New Sincerity. Writers whose work is discussed in the chapter include Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Dana Spiotta, Colson Whitehead and David Foster Wallace.

This essay analyzes Richard Powers's The Overstory (2018), a novel that ostensibly demands an eco-critical reading, under the lens of neurodiversity. Focusing on the idiosyncrasies of sensory perception in autism, the essay explores the atypical engagement with the more-than-human that neurodiversity (and specifically autism) fosters-a kind of engagement that deeply destabilizes neuro-normative, human-centered subjectivity, opening up to more egalitarian ways of relation with the environment. In a novel populated by neurodivergent characters with a keen ecological sensibility, Powers comes close to imagining this kind of non-hierarchical connection with the natural world. The essay explores how neurodiversity works in the novel at a characterological, thematic, and structural level, functioning as a bridge between human and non-human scales. In this way, neurodiversity finely glosses and articulates the kind of animistic, environmental message that Powers instils in his Pulitzer prize winning novel.

This essay attempts to develop a new framework for interpreting narrative ecocritically. It combines environmental virtue ethics from philosophy with narrative ethics from narrative theory, and provides a detailed reading of Richard Powers' novel 'Gain' that exemplifies the proposed reading practice.

This paper analyses the way Richard Powers portrays plant life in his 2018 novel The Overstory. Unlike in traditional literary depictions of botany, trees are presented as actors and not passive objects. By undermining the mind/ matter, human/ nonhuman distinctions Powers reduces the gap separating his human protagonists and trees. The latter have agency, intentionality and the ability to communicate. Powers also attempts to find a new way to give his vegetal life voice. Instead of anthropomorphizing them, plants talk in their own material way. This paper draws from posthumanist writings by, among others, Donna Haraway Anna Tsing Lowenhaupt, Mark Jackson, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and also from Michael Marder's and Serpil Opperman's ideas on plant language and storytelling.

It will be published at the beginning of the year in Sensus Historiae
For citation queries please email: p.austin932@gmail.com

Drawing on recent developments in critical plant studies, this essay attempts to develop an ethological poetics of trees. I start by analysing four examples of recent fiction, poetry and nonfiction that are each about different kinds of trees - The Overstory by Richard Powers; Translations from Bark Beetle by Jody Gladding; Tree Talks by Wendy Burk; The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage - with relation to JC Ryan's phytocritical model. In addition to their representation of botanical lives, I also consider how Powers and Gammage understand trees as constitutive of Indigenous kinship networks. Then, I combine the insights gleaned from the textual analysis with work by Michael Marder and others in order to outline key features of tree ontology and articulation, and I conclude by positing a provisional arboreal poetics.

Embracing the intersectional methodological outlook of the environmental humanities, the contributors to this edited collection explore the entanglements of cultures, ecologies, and socio-ethical issues in the roles of trees and their relationships with humans through narratives in literature and art.

Briefly explores the contradictions and why they matter in Nathaniel Rich's essay.  The entire issue of The New York Times Magazine of 5 August 2018 was devoted to this piece of investigative journalism, which readers are urged to read for themselves and weigh their own responses.  Includes an addendum on Richard Powers' epic novel The Overstory (2017), an Anthropocene-era masterpiece.

This paper explores the creation of (a sense of) reality in Richard Powers’ 2006 novel The Echo Maker and Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra, especially as that latter is applied by Kevin Casper to the 2010 movie Jackass 3D. The focus is on neurology, or perhaps neurophilosophy, rather than literary criticism or film studies, or even Baudrillard’s cultural theory: the various cultural texts are interrogated for what their explicit and implicit neurological theories can tell us about how we “realize” (organize, make real) our selves and/in the world. Key in this process, the paper shows, are “fiction” for Powers (as it arises out of ubiquitous human “confabulation” as an attempt to impose coherence on the self and the world) and “simulacra” for Baudrillard; both become primary channels of social construction. The Capgras Delusion, which Powers places at the center of his novel, is especially useful in its tracking of the effects damage to our emotional circuits has on the creation of a sense of reality; Powers even seeks to universalize Capgras as a general human failure to accept the kinship of all living things, or what Arne Naess calls “the Self-realization of the ecological self.” This universalized deficit is close enough to Baudrillard’s (faux?-)apocalyptic conception of simulacra subsuming reality into virtuality in postmodernity to make it a useful test for Baudrillard’s jeremiads. Ultimately the paper moves in the direction of icosis as the somatic group plausibilization of normative opinion.

This essay argues that Richard Powers’ The Overstory is an example of how literature, as a narrative that is both reflective and focused on representation, contributes to current circulating debates surrounding the valorisation, productivity and practicality of interdisciplinary knowledge. This essay reads Powers’ novel against the tendency within our society to value literature only on the basis of individual artistic accomplishments. This tendency establishes a boundary between art and science and excludes literature from the realm of a ‘problem-solving’ practicality (Clark 190). As our analysis shows, the novel reflects on the impact and value of interdisciplinary knowledge by presenting a narrative that traces the production and reception of a interdisciplinary work. Additionally, the novel endows the debate about interdisciplinary knowledge with a new light by ‘treeing’ its narrative in both its narratological form and thematic content. It listens to the message of trees as lives mediating between multiple spatial-temporal scales and frames the characters’ sensitivity to this message as a scale awareness. Finally, the interdisciplinary conflicts are read as scale conflicts which the characters in the novel encounter when they try to provide solution to the issue of deforestation.

The nineteenth-century invention of the category of the "spiritual"as opposed to being religious was deeply entangled within American Romanticism's larger project of reenchanting nature. While this relocation of spiritual authority out of the church and into the woods and wilderness echoes some of the larger dynamics of secularization that have long been a problematic for theories of Romanticism (see Abrams 1971), it also birthed a form of nature religiosity that still colors, for better and for worse, much contemporary American environmental thought. One of American Romanticism's most consequential legacies in the present, this chapter argues, is in an ongoing American predilection for sanctified landscape. This predilection is buttressed by models of conversion and self-transformation that have deep roots in Emersonian Transcendentalism and its larger dilations within postbellum culture. If this is where the sublimity of the New World has sometimes met the "woo-woo" of the New Age, this green spirituality and its attendant aesthetic forms has nevertheless inculcated viable forms of environmental politics, from legal frameworks for preservation and conservation to more radical forms of civil disobedience and environmental activism.

The University of North Carolina Press
Volume 45, October 2021
pp. 229-255

In this article, I contrast humanist and cognitivist discourses, and argue that when humanists distance themselves from metanarratives, cognitivists will effectively commandeer the terrain and claim that one cannot contest cognitivist discourse at all. Since cognitivist science has eclipsed and undermined the humanities in terms of cultural capital and funding, it is important to examine how humanists—in this case, an emblematic critical theorist, Slavoj Žižek, and a novelist, Richard Powers—have responded to its implications. The recurring question is whether philosophy or science has become dominant not just epistemologically, but ontologically; one of Žižek's primary tenets is that "the human being reduced to an object of technological manipulation is no longer properly human" (Žižek, Event 29). But Žižek also a priori concludes material factors cannot wholly account for human behavior, communication or identity. Žižek attempts to bolster the relevance and import of the humanities by asserting its priority and, sometimes oddly, its conservative credentials: "philosophy is in a way more critical, more cautious even, than science. Philosophy asks even more elementary questions" (Žižek, Conversations 25). Even as he decries the effects that scientific manipulation, alteration and deterministic discourses have on human identity, however, Žižek insists that we already are fragmented, "artificial," and determined, but by inherent ontological limitations rather than by pure materialism. Žižek exhorts "philosophers, when we hear that modern science and technology pose a threat to our human identity … [to ask] which notion of "human"[?] … [As Heidegger suggests], humanist protests against the reign of technology are ultimately futile" (Žižek, Disparities 28). In other words, for Žižek, humanist objections to the way cognitivism and technology dehumanize us, and turn us into determinate and inhuman subjects, erroneously presume that we begin as fully self-integrated humans, and try to preserve some totality we lack as a constitutive feature of our being.

In the second part of the essay, I assess the confluence between Žižek's Lacanian and Richard Powers' humanist narratives regarding science. Both writers view cognitivist sciences as transcendental—for Žižek via the transcendentalism of German idealism and for Powers via the transcendentalism of the American Renaissance—and [End Page 229] yet inadequate because, in effect, they are too successful. Žižek and Powers pit the humanist metanarrative against the cognitivist one, and both start with the premise that cognitivism abrogates narrative itself.

One of Žižek's concerns regarding cognitivism is that the Event that has been the domain of narrative has been co-opted by the domain of science. Summarizing the divide between humanism and scientific determinism and cognitivism, Lyotard concluded that it is "impossible to judge the existence or validity of narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge and vice versa: the relevant criteria are different. … Lamenting the 'loss of meaning' in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative" (26).1 Similarly, according to Žižek, a positivist form of scientism threatens the categories of knowledge and communication that comprise the basis of human subjectivity: "the transcendental approach reached its apogee with [Heidegger] … while the ontological one seems today kidnapped by natural sciences; we expect the answer to the question of the origins of our universe to come from quantum cosmology, the brain sciences and evolutionism" (Žižek, Event 6). This straightforward claim also hints at the religious anxiety that would attend the receipt of absolute knowledge, which would obviate faith, or the arrival of a messiah, god, or judgment day—i.e., any aspect of eschatology. Addressing the other temporal end of the ontological spectrum, the beginning, Žižek contends that science now offers the metanarratives that preclude human narrative: the "New emerges through narrative, the apparently purely reproductive retelling of what happened—it is this retelling that opens up the space (the possibility) of acting in a new way" (133). In Žižek's estimation, we can tell stories and communicate as humans only because of "a minimal temporal gap between the existence of things in their immediate brute reality, and the registration...

In his article "World War I and the Idea of Progress in Powers's Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance" Karsten H. Piep reads Powers's 1985 debut novel as a critical reexamination of the dynamics and iconography of the early twentieth century that challenges the technological positivism espoused by many US neoconservatives during the 1980s, while insisting on the individual's interpretive powers to discern and release the ever present transformative potentials of history. Situating Three Farmers in the postmodernism debates of the 1980s, Piep argues that the novel succeeds in challenging the idea of history as linear progression, but ultimately fails to show how a critical engagement with the past might engender socially transformation action in the present.

Link to journal issue: CLC 18.1 (2016): http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol18/iss1/

This paper analyses the way Richard Powers portrays plant life in his 2018 novel The Overstory . Unlike in traditional literary depictions of botany, trees are presented as actors and not passive objects. By undermining the mind/ matter, human/ nonhuman distinctions Powers reduces the gap separating his human protagonists and trees. The latter have agency, intentionality and the ability to communicate. Powers also attempts to find a new way to give his vegetal life voice. Instead of anthropomorphizing them, plants talk in their own material way. This paper draws from posthumanist writings by, among others, Donna Haraway Anna Tsing Lowenhaupt, Mark Jackson, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and also from Michael Marder’s and Serpil Opperman’s ideas on plant language and storytelling.

Richard Powers’ The Overstory ideally goes back to the writer’s first novel Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance (1985) and to August Sander’s photograph bearing the same title (1914). This is a portrait of three young men standing behind each other in a dandyish upright posture, wearing fancy suits and proudly looking into the camera, happy to go to their dance but completely oblivious that a second funereal dance is awaiting them: the Second World War and––very plausibly––death. The German photographer included this very popular shot in a massive and incomplete project called People of the Twentieth Century, an immense archive showing a pictorial survey of the German society’s class structure during the Weimer Republic. The Overstory is a very similar project. If we substitute Sander’s human types with tree types, physiognomic analysis with phytobiography, human time with tree-time, we might start to grasp the objective and scope of Powers’s last novel: an immense epic on time, imperiled biomes and human and nonhuman multiple entanglements. The overstory of the title, in fact, refers to both the trees’ perspective and to the time frame adopted in the story: almost four billions of years, where humans––in their transient appearance––have been somehow interrelated with trees and plants. Because of this scope, The Overstory has rightfully been considered an example of the Great American Novel: more than 500 pages of distilled erudition that slowly builds up a book “obsessed with the erotics of knowledge” to use Richard Powers’ words. But also, as I will try to demonstrate, with the idea of the urgency to imitate August Sander’s venture, to start a process of visualization and documentation of trees, an archival project that draws on history, truth, memory, empathy and is dictated by the peril of death, by the threat of extinction. Similarly to Sander’s portfolio of “archetypes,” Richard Powers’ nine characters portrayed in the book may be seen as human archetypes of the Anthropocene––each of them paired to a matching arboreal companion––and thus attesting to the inventorial agenda of this project. One in particular, Nicholas Hoel, an environmental artist who corresponds to the American chestnut that survives the decimating blight on the family’s Iowa farm, is the last to inherit a long standing tradition started by his great-great-grandfather one hundred years earlier: to take a photo of the tree the same day in March. And yet, as Richard Powers writes: “The generations of grudge, courage, forbearance, and surprise generosity: everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photos’ frame.” The Overstory is finally a novel about time and time recording, which is a ceaseless and paradoxical activity for trees as they tell the time when they stop living: their concentric bands are another way of indexing, another catalogue of seasons and experience, another way to photograph and elude death: “Dendrochronology—the science of studying time by way of trees—is a postmortem practice encircled by beginnings and endings” (Murphy 2018).

In Richard Powers's novel Orfeo (2014), the literary legacy of Jorge Luis Borges manifests itself in both narrative form and subject matter. Powers's main character and focalizer Peter Els begins by setting the Argentine's poetry to music and ends up becoming a composer-analogue to the notorious Pierre Menard, "author" of Don Quixote. Managing to develop a material, biochemical realization of the abstract "music of the spheres," the protagonist engages the reader in an intrinsic intellectual jeu, whereupon we are trapped to experience "gradations of fictivity"--i.e. the idea that some fictional subjects and events can be "less" fictive than others, which Wolf Schmid (2003) denounces on (narrato)logical grounds. By developing an embodied rapport with Els and his music, Powers's readers are brought to appreciate the music that noone can hear, just like Borges's audience is provided a direct access to an existent text by a non-existent novelist, Pierre Menard.

Seeing it as a test case for the experientiality of narrative, I reclaim the concept of diegetic music from film to literature studies. My concern is whether readers can gain musical experience from what Scher dubs “verbal music”—diegetic music’s textual exponent, which I re-theorize in terms of audionarratology. As a storyworld phenomenon, diegetic music is literally heard by characters. However, we can only privilege it over other sonic events of the fictional universe if a specifically musical experience is transmitted across the borders of the diégèse. Seeking a solution to this problem, I borrow theoretical tools from the philosophy of music and cognitive narratology. First, I map three aspects of music—physical sound, tonal movement, and affective narrative—on what I call the “Triangular Iceberg of Musical Experience,” arguing for their complementary presence in individual listening acts, in different proportions. Second, I apply Jahn’s model of externalization/internalization of stories to show the cyclic nature of music’s circulation, which also applies to transitions of music to worlds of narrative fiction and back. Third, my three example case studies of verbal music outline the routes and constraints for readers’ enactive overhearing of diegetic music. Finally, I chart some textual variables to be manipulated in empirical testing of my hypotheses as my proposed follow-up to the present study. The essay demonstrates how “musicalized” prose provides a unique meeting point for reader-oriented narrative theory, intermediality studies, and empirical aesthetics.

Please note: the editors ruined the published version of this article  (they published the uncorrected page proofs, into which they also had inserted a considerable number of mistakes,  which they actually refused to correct even on line). I have attached the version that should have been published.

4th Annual Borsch-Rast Book Lecture. Public Talk delivered @ the GTU on receiving the 2021 Borsch-Rast Book Prize for *A Language of Things: Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination* (University of Virginia Press, 2020). Published in the Berkeley Journal of Religion and Theology 7.1 (Winter 2021): 62-83.

This chapter argues that Richard Powers's 1998 novel Gain establishes a relationship between its two main characters--a corporation called Clare International and suburban mom named Laura Bodey--that has often been misread. Readers mistake the hints Laura encounters that Clare is responsible for her ovarian cancer for facts, assuming an antagonism between this corporation and this citizen. Such readings overlook the basic science of ovarian cancer as well as the particular way Powers frames Laura's analysis of her relationship with Clare.
My chapter looks at Laura''s understudied half of the novel, framing it as a cancer narrative that reworks important conventions of that genre. In considering the experience of cancer in  broad social, economic, and environmental contexts, Powers offers a corrective to the individualist strain that often runs though illness narratives. In so doing, the novel also pushes us to engage with questions of consumer agency and  bodily frailty in the face of corporate dominance.

Richard Powers's novel "Generosity: An Enhancement" (2009) engages with the contemporary anxiety over whether genetic enhancement will inexorably lead to the end of human nature as we know it, a concern deeply etched into the genetic imaginary that increasingly characterizes Western society. In "Generosity", Powers concentrates on the pursuit of happiness in terms of the potential of a genetically engineered sense of contentment and euphoria. Indeed, the novel revolves around a character who appears to be so consistently happy that one of her teachers, a writer, and later a geneticist, comes to believe that her state of hyperthymia may have a genetic basis. The novel chronicles her gradual descent into depression through constant exposure to the media and the greed of people who want to partake of her eternal bliss. The announcement of the discovery in her genome of a gene that appears to have a direct influence on people's predisposition for happiness leads to a media furore that drives her to isolation and a pronounced state of anxiety. The role of nature versus nurture is thoroughly interrogated while the potential and threat of chemically induced contentment for the masses is reminiscent of a similar debate rehearsed in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932), as is the future scenario of genetically enhanced beings or designer babies. This essay attempts to tease out the main ramifications of these issues with recourse to recent scientific findings in genetics as well as the ethics of human enhancement.

Celem artykułu jest zidentyfikowanie w najnowszej, powstałej na początku XXI wieku literaturze swoistego nurtu powieści konwersyjnych. Dotychczas tego rodzaju teksty sytuowane były wobec nowoczesnej powieści idei lub fikcji filozoficznej, ale takie przyporządkowania wydają się niewystarczające i nieadekwatne wobec nowych tekstów, których szczególnie wyrazistą egzemplifikacją jest Elizabeth Costello J.M.Coetzee. Artykuł proponuje w zamian odniesienie tej i licznych, nawiązujących do niej powieści, do wielowiekowej tradycji tekstów konwersyjnych, mających swoje główne źródła w tradycji hebrajskich tekstów prorockich i greckich pismach protreptycznych. Prowadzone analizy zmierzają jednak do podkreślenia odrębności współczesnych tekstów, które nie tylko realizują konwencjonalny schemat tekstów konwersyjnych, ale przede wszystkim problematyzują samo zjawisko konwersyjnej retoryki tekstu.

The title coinage of this book, stimulacra, refers to the fundamental capacity of literary narrative to stimulate our minds and senses by simulating things through words. Musical stimulacra are passages of fiction that readers are empowered to transpose into mental simulations of music. The book theorizes how fiction can generate musical experience, explains what constitutes that experience, and explores the musical dimensions of three American novels: William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central (2005), William H. Gass’s Middle C (2013), and Richard Powers’s Orfeo (2014). Musical Stimulacra approaches fiction’s music from a readerly perspective. Instead of looking at how novels forever fail to compensate for music’s physical, structural, and affective properties, the book concentrates on what literary narrative can do musically. Negotiating common grounds for cognitive audionarratology and intermediality studies, Musical Stimulacra builds its case on the assumption that, among other things, fiction urges us to listen—to musical words and worlds.

Richard Powers's 2009 novel, Generosity: An Enhancement frequently has been read as a literary exposition of the mechanism by which post-industrial consumer culture seizes upon science to create and devour its own images of happiness. What has so far remained largely unexamined are the ways in which the novel's depictions of its Algerian female protagonist provide a subtle form of cultural criticism that enacts the Occident's longstanding appropriation of the Orient in contemporary times. Inverting the plot but adopting the tenor of nineteenth-and twentieth-century travelogues, Powers's Generosity makes its characters as well as its readers complicit in the Western world's ongoing Orientalist project by taking them on a quest to decode and take possession of the secret of happiness that U.S. American culture projects onto the body of a young Algerian refugee women.

In this article, I provide a cultural history of some of the critical predicates of corporate personhood. I track the Hobbesian lineage of the corporate form, but also the ways the corporation, ascribed with numinous agency and personhood, has filled the cultural space vacated by our transcendence of anthropomorphic notions of god and Nature.

The corporation was created through the consent of the sovereign, and its charter was formulated to reflect not only its uses, but its potential threat, particularly with regard to its concentration of power. Established under the aegis of individual states, the U.S. corporation was initially restricted to specific functions for limited periods. But corporations in many contexts not only have supplanted the Hobbesian state that created them, but displaced the individual person.

Corporations have become super-persons and forms of sovereigns themselves, in part by acquiring human rights and “personalities” and tethering them to the corporation’s inhuman attributes. However, corporations don’t just mimic human behaviors; at best simulacra, or imitations of human life, corporations challenge and destabilize the status of personhood, and what it means to be a person.

In the process, corporations have amassed not just wealth, but personhood (for example, in perhaps surprising ways, the personhood of African Americans). In many ways, the ever-increasing wealth gap in the United States is actually a personhood gap. The overarching effect of corporate personhood, which operates in tandem with privatization, is to dehumanize people, turning them into things that have no rights. Created to encourage entrepreneurial (or reckless and socially irresponsible) risk-taking and minimize personal liability, the corporation evolved into an entity that dynamically diminishes the personal.

The corporation represents a collective, transcendental body that has taken on the role of a deity, and, in U.S. ontology, of nature. The relationships between human and corporate personhood and identity implicate fantasies of the supernal; the superhuman; immortality; and the transcendence of individuality. For these reasons, I treat the corporation not primarily as a commercial enterprise, but as a cultural phantasm, a kind of black hole that draws in more and more cultural phenomena into its orbit. The modern corporation has come to guarantee certain rights at a price, in much the way the Hobbesian state once did. People barter their attributes to corporations; but they are no longer trading liberty for security, but “souls” for identity. As the corporation comes to serve as the de facto guarantor and distributor of culture, it remains amoral at best, and in practice serves as a dominant pathological personality that helps reduce all human endeavor to commercial interest.

Post·hum·an·ous (pst-hymən-nəs) adj. 1. Occurring or continuing after the death of the human: a posthumanous writing. 2. Published after the death of the Author: a posthumanous book. 3. Born after the death of the patriarchy: a posthumanous child. 4. Any activity which presumes the fatal limitation of the rational-humanist subject. This issue has two sections, theory and practice. The theory essays deal with the posthuman and apocalypse, cyborgs, schizophrenics and the pitfalls of posthumanism, X-men and posthuman ethics. In practice, the woman in Alien as cyborg, J.G. Ballard's fiction, William Gibson's fiction, Richard Powers' fictions, and philip k. dick's fiction. There are plenty of reviews and review essays to match.

The last three decades have seen a dramatic increase in realist fiction about science. Contemporary storylines focus on a wide variety of disciplines: genetics, information technology, ecology, physics, astronomy, pharmacology, neuroscience, robotics, nanotechnology, and other fields. Our chapter provides an overview of this development, surveying fiction by Richard Powers, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Crichton, Gary Shteyngart, Vandana Singh, and others. We argue that different fields of science prompt different types of questions about the relationship between science and society. Care for the specificity of disciplines—their particular protocols and concerns—signals a cultural revaluing of the importance of science for society, as does the success of many novels in making science personal and aesthetically pleasurable. Drawing attention to the socio-economic, educational, and cultural aspects of science not only reveals science’s imbrication in society, but also marks a shift in science’s place in Western culture.

Two mid-twentieth century Slavic aestheticians, both of whom applied the 'polyphony' metaphor to literature, inaugurated influential theories of incompletion. For Bakhtin (see 1963/1984), the polyphonic novel of Dostoevsky maintains an ongoing dialogue of characters' discourses, which resists closure and can only be artificially aborted in the author's 'monologic' finale. In Ingarden (see 1931/1973), the multi-layered structure of the literary work is brought together in a "polyphonic harmony" of aesthetic qualities, but its "stratum of represented objects" is merely a schema, which stays indeterminate no matter how much information is added to 'concretize' it. Neither Bakhtin nor Ingarden associates incompletion with the technical ending of the work. Instead, incompletion is inherent in the work's parts-characters' voices or structural layers; unfinished fragments permeate narrative from the inside. In this paper, I apply these theoretical insights to the subject beyond Bakhtin's and Ingarden's interest-musicalized novels. I discuss some recurrent patterns combined with frequent and extensive intermedial thematization of music (see Wolf 1999) in William H. Gass's Middle C (2013) and Richard Powers's Orfeo (2014) with respect to narrative 'streams' that account for the novels' 'polyphonic' effect. In particular, I am interested in the digressive sequences of textual fragments that are composed by the two novels' protagonists and incorporated into the novels' surface plots. I focus on how, in Middle C, the impostor music professor Joseph Skizzen redrafts his one-sentence summary of human history until it turns into a verbal twelve-tone row, and how, in Orfeo, the composer Peter Els's Twitter messages parallel his biomusical project that results in his being taken for a terrorist. Skizzen's sketches of his sentence accumulate without replacing each other, while Els's tweets shape his first-person narrative explaining how his music is bound to live forever in the bacterial DNA he has modified. These streams of incompletion not only provide the text with a means of intermedial imitation but also metafictionally designate the ability of narrative to continue beyond its own end, obtaining a quasi-temporality that Ingarden (see 1973/1986) associated with musical works.

Gibt es einen Roman des Neoliberalismus, einen Roman der Krise? Der am 24. Juni 1962 in Duisburg geborene Enno Stahl versucht sich daran. In seinem ersten großen Roman »Diese Seelen« von 2008 erzählte er »Geschichten aus dem Neoliberalismus«, mit »Winkler, Werber« hat er ein »Psychogramm der Krise« vorgelegt.

Internet est une base de données multiforme, décentralisée, dynamique et en pleine expansion. Une structure de données capable de phagocyter tout ce que l’humanité a pu produire jusqu’ici. Tout est en voie de numérisation. La perspective a même quelque chose d’effrayant. Mais une machine est-elle capable, à l’heure actuelle, de s’emparer de cette masse de données et de la traiter afin d’en constituer des récits? Cette question, la nouvelle de Richard Powers, « Literacy Devices », parue à l’hiver 2002, lui donne un tour nouveau, mettant en scène une situation à la limite du possible jouant sur l’indétermination du statut des textes en contexte d’hypertextualité et de cyberculture. Par la réalité à peine anticipée du générateur de récits qu’elle met en scène, par les multiples effets de réel utilisés qui brouillent les lignes de démarcation entre la science et la fiction, la fable de Richard Powers est d’une extraordinaire efficacité. J’en décrirai les principaux procédés littéraires, montrant ce faisant qu’un médium aussi vieux et usé que peut l’être la littérature parvient parfois à se faire plus convaincant que le plus sophistiqué des logiciels. Comme le dit Powers, « Notre rêve d’un nouvel outil nous amène à croire que la prochaine invention nous donnera une meilleure image du monde, plus pleine, plus riche, plus précise aussi et immédiate, quand c’est l’opposé qui se produit. La télévision n’améliore pas l’efficacité de la radio, la photographie, celle de la peinture. Plus le médium est sophistiqué, plus le degré de médiation est élevé. »

This chapter explores the turn to formally conventional fiction among American writers in the 2000s. It positions this turn not as a capitulation to the norms of neoliberal capitalism, as other critics have argued, but as a formally oriented response to neoliberalism’s effects on US society since the 1970s. In the new politics of form, postmodern and avant-garde experimentalism are coded as unresponsive to an increasingly fragmented and atomistic culture, whereas the conservation of forms becomes understood as a politically progressive project. The chapter outlines this twenty-first-century politics of form using evidence from the fiction, non-fiction and interviews of several high-profile American novelists.