Forecasting the Past and Recalling the Future: Lemniscate Narratives in the Work of Richard Powers

Richard Powers’s multifaceted accounts of individuals navigating turbulent histories are relayed via nonlinear timelines, situating the future in relation to an imminent past. The characters’ reassembly of pre-existing compositions, patterns, and traditions in self-styled configurations, engages with interlocking legacies whilst asserting their individual perspective on reality. Multiple analyses of Powers’s texts have focused on the permeable borders between interconnected genres, eras, and disciplines in relation to spliced or stereoscopic images of society. The six texts analysed in this comparative study depict twofold timelines intersecting in the present, creating a lemniscate form with a seemingly endless course of expansion. This comparative approach assesses the converging and diverging lemniscate narrative form and content of six texts written at different stages in Powers’s career. The thesis explores the purpose of each text’s proposed lemniscate temporal frame in relation to the reoccurring depictions of transmedial utopian fictions and a neocolonial US history. This synthesis of pre-existing forms, modernist, and postmodernist world views resembles a metamodernist or transglossic literary style. The tensions between individual and hegemonic ideologies are explored within the three comparative chapters, evaluating the similarities and differences between Powers’s treatment of music and science, innovation and neocolonialism, and individual and collective responses to autonomy in the Atomic Age US.