Ideas of Order: Narrative Patterns in the Novels of Richard Powers
Conference at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
11/26 - 11/28 2010
According to Richard Powers,
whose
ten novels to date have generated a lively critical discourse,
literature needs to
engage with all the
available modes of knowledge and representation to examine how identity
is
constituted in culturally situated relations. Powers insists that “you cannot understand a person
minimally, you cannot understand a person simply as a function of his
inability
to get along with his wife, you cannot even understand a person through
his
supposedly causal psychological profile.” Powers’s
novels engage with this
understanding of the individual as a complex system that exceeds the
mere sum
of its parts by implementing narrative patterns which establish
parallels and
symmetries between radically different levels of experience. However, the
patterns and systems created in his novels are less
predefined templates that would reduce the inherent complexity of the world in order to enable
its
representation. They are much rather
self-consciously symmetric narratives that
function
as self-referential artifices through which the world can be refracted
and
ultimately reaffirmed. Consequently,
Powers’s novels are described as hovering between the poles
of mimetic realism
and metafictional postmodernism, creating narratives in which the
conventions
of realism are both deployed and undermined, in which characters are
simultaneously
presented as motivated agents and as
textual constructs.
Taking its cue from Wallace
Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at
The
conference is supported by contributions from the Dr. German
Schweiger-Stiftung (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg) as well as from these
following
organizations: