Musical Macrostructures in The Gold Bug Variations and Orfeo by Richard Powers; or, Toward a Media-Conscious Audionarratology

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
A. Elisabeth Reichel
Keyword(s):  
Richard Powers

scholarly journals Uncovering the Struggling Inner Voice of Green Beings Through The Novel “The Overstory” By Richard Powers

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (S1-Dec2020) ◽  
pp. 63-66
Author(s):  
Saranya Lakshmanan ◽  
P Nagaraj
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Richard Powers ◽  
Human Survival ◽  
Inner Voice

Nature and literature are interwoven. Without natural world, the beauty of words cannot be celebrated. So far in literature the exquisiteness of nature is being taken into deliberation. Trees play a crucial role in our planet but they are taken for granted by humans for their sophisticated life. It is easy to plant tree saplings but it is very difficult to protect a tree. Trees play an important role for human survival. Still people are not concerned to protect or conserve forest because they are connected with machines than with nature. Every individuals run behind the technical advancement that they will protest in virtual media to safeguard nature but not in reality. Trees do communicate but human fails to understand. This study unfurls the dark destroying side of nature through the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Overstory by Robert Powers.

‘Modulation’ by Richard Powers: Digital sound, compression and the short story

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 161-176
Author(s):  
Michael Hedges
Keyword(s):  
Data Compression ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Richard Powers ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
File Size ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
Use Of Data ◽  
Music File ◽  
Digital Sound

This article presents a reading of ‘Modulation’ (2008) by Richard Powers. Firstly, I consider the short story’s representation of the MP3 music file, specifically its effects on how music is circulated and stored, as well as how it sounds. These changes are the result of different processes of compression. The MP3 format makes use of data compression to reduce the file size of a digital recording significantly. Such a loss of information devises new social and material relations between what remains of the original music, the recording industry from which MP3s emerged and the online markets into which they enter. I argue that ‘Modulation’ is a powerful evocation of a watershed moment in how we consume digital sound: what Jonathan Sterne has termed the rise of the MP3 as ‘cultural artifact’. I contend that the short story, like the MP3, is also a compressed manner of representation. I use narrative theory and short story criticism to substantiate this claim, before positioning ‘Modulation’ alongside Powers’s novels of information. I conclude by suggesting that ‘Modulation’ offers an alternative to representing information through an excess of data. This article reads Powers’s compressed prose as a formal iteration of the data compression the story narrates.

scholarly journals Ethical Mimesis and Emergence Aesthetics

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Green Energy ◽  
Natural Phenomenon ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Richard Powers ◽  
Living Matter ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
Emergence Theory ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Nature Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic

In nature the transformation of dead matter (objects) into living matter endowed with green energy or subjectivity is called emergence. Art itself, I argue, is an emergence phenomenon, enacting and replicating in theme and form emergence in nature. Literature thus conceived is about the emergence of spirit. It depicts forces that suppress spirit and enables the spiritual in nature to find expression. It gives voice to spirit rising. Mimesis is thus reconceived as a replication of the natural phenomenon of emergence, which brings to life what has hitherto been seen as object, dead matter. This article outlines the concept of emergence in current philosophical and scientific theories; examines the aesthetic precursors of emergence theory in certain Frankfurt School theorists, notably Theodor Adorno; and applies emergence aesthetic theory to a contemporary novel, Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018).

The Elusive Brain

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Tougaw ◽  
Joseph LeDoux
Keyword(s):  
Brain Research ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Richard Powers ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
Brain Physiology ◽  
Mental Experience ◽  
Graphic Narratives ◽  
Comprehensive Survey ◽  
Mystery Novels

The Elusive Brain is the first comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. Jason Tougaw analyzes the works of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, Maud Casey, Jonathan Lethem, Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, and Siri Hustvedt, Ellen Forney, and David B.—arguing that their experiments with literary form offer a necessary counterbalance to a wider cultural neuromania that seeks out purely neural explanations for human behaviors as varied as reading, economics, empathy, and racism. Tougaw surveys memoirs about life with autism, epilepsy manic depression, or brain injury; revisionist mystery novels; and graphic narratives that engage neuroscience. The book argues that these works offer insight about how it feels and what it means to live with a brain whose role in the making of self or consciousness is far from fully understood. Brain memoirs and neuronovels revel in the mysteries of the explanatory gap between brain physiology and mental experience. In the process, these literary works offer an antidote to polarizing and outmoded debates about the “cerebral subject,” whether we are our brains (or not our brains). Rather than engaging in abstract philosophical debate, these literary works explore questions about neurodiversity politics and the stakes of rapidly advancing brain research for people whose experience represent what critic Ralph Savarese calls “all manner of neurologies.”

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document