A LEXANDER S CHERR The Emergence of ‘Genomic Life Writing’ and ‘Genomic Fiction’ as Indicators of Cultural Change: A Case Study of Richard Powers’ Novel Generosity: An Enhancement (2009) 1. Cultural Change: The Millennial Hype Surrounding the Human Genome and Its Symbolic Mediations While pinpointing and describing cultural change generally calls for careful observation and reconstruction, the historiographical task appears a little easier than usual in the present case. This is because the events that instigated the kind of cultural change this essay focuses on were imbued with symbolic power from the very beginning: In a climate of millennial hopes and anxieties, U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair jointly announced on June 26, 2000, that the Human Genome Project - the world’s largest collaborative research project in the life sciences to date - had just completed a working draft of the genetic composition of Homo sapiens. This rough draft, which, strictly speaking, contained the genetic information of fifteen different members of the human species, was first made available to the general public in February 2001. Looking back on the release, literary scholar Patricia Waugh recalls how she purchased her own private copy of the genome in the form of a CD-ROM that came along with the latest version of Prospect magazine: “This was a disk carrying the recipe for the human species. Like the voices of the long-dead divas and the up-andcoming rock starlets, the ‘code of life’ had now been digitally remastered and made available at the click of a mouse.” 1 To Waugh, “[t]he disk seemed the perfect symbol for the year 2000. For here was the entire string of three billion letters, arranged in the various combinations and repetitions with difference of the four-letter alphabet, proclaimed as the recipe for creating a human being.” 2 1 Patricia Waugh, “Science and Fiction in the 1990s,” British Fiction of the 1990s, ed. Nick Bentley (London, New York: Routledge, 2005), 57. 2 Waugh 58. The “four-letter alphabet,“ which Waugh talks about, refers to the four nucleobases that constitute the building blocks of a DNA molecule. For the “millennial hype” accompanying the sequencing of the genome, see also Judith Roof, The Poetics of DNA (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 2-3. A LEXANDER S CHERR 122 The language with which Waugh describes her memories of the release of the reference genome knowingly employs the very metaphors that have informed cultural communication about genes since the 1950s. Due to the influence of the new cybernetic paradigm of information, ‘life’ became somewhat synonymous with ‘writing’ at that time. 3 Apart from having been thought of as the ‘code of life,’ the genome has also been imagined as a ‘text,’ an ‘alphabet’ or - in quasi-religious terms - as nothing less than the ‘book of life.’ Thus, while they are not an invention of our post-genomic age, “scriptural representations of life,” as Lily E. Kay aptly calls such metaphors, have been revived in the context of the scientific breakthrough constituted by the completion of the first human reference genome. 4 We can find ‘book of life’ metaphors almost everywhere - from Matt Ridley’s popular science book Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1999), which starts with a parody of the biblical story in John 1: 1 (“In the beginning was the word…”), 5 to the declaration made by Eric Lander, a Professor of Biology at MIT and a member of the Obama administration’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, in a 2001 interview: “I don’t know if people realize that we just found the world’s greatest history book. We are going to be up every night reading tales from the genome. It’s so cool.” 6 Needless to say, the central epistemological question is whether the genome actually qualifies as a “history book” from which ready-made “tales” can be read. There are at least two major reasons that cast doubt on this claim. For one thing, scientists have emphasized that genetic determinism - the idea that genes ‘predict’ a future outcome in our lives - constitutes a workable framework only in the case of rare single-gene disorders, such as Huntington’s disease. For the large majority of physical and mental traits, on 3 Sarah Franklin concisely describes the impact of the cybernetic concept of ‘information’ on the life sciences in the second half of the twentieth century with the following formula: “[N]ature becomes biology becomes genetics, through which life itself becomes reprogrammable information.” Sarah Franklin, “Life Itself: Global Nature, Global Culture,” Global Nature, Global Culture, eds. Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, Jackie Stacey (London: Sage, 2000), 190. 4 Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), 2. 5 See Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000 [1999]), 11. 6 Qtd. in Kate O’Riordan, “Writing Biodigital Life: Personal Genomes and Digital Media,” Biography 34.1 (2011): 126. For the omnipresence of ‘book of life’ metaphors in cultural mediations of the genome, see also Roof 83: “The prevalence of book and language metaphors for DNA and genes is so great that it would be impossible to list them all. The genome as the book of life has been the most prominent of these, and we usually take the idea of DNA as an alphabet for granted.” Genomic Life Writing and Genomic Fiction 123 the other hand, the influence of genes on our lives remains ‘probabilistic.’ 7 But the idea of the genome as a kind of ‘life narrative’ also appears questionable because of a second (albeit closely related) reason: If the genome can be thought of as a language at all, then it is a language without grammatical tenses. As Jay Clayton has stressed with his felicitous concept of “genome time,” the genome constitutes something like “a perpetual present,” in which “the relationship between past, present and future is arbitrary.” 8 In this sense, “[t]he present becomes everything but the past and future are not actually effaced. Instead, all times are inscribed in the present, encoded in the moment. […] [T]he present is made to contain every possible permutation of time as a suddenly legible system of signs.” 9 Hence, with regard to its ‘tellability,’ the major problem posed by the genome is that it seems difficult, if not altogether impossible, to translate the synchronic possibilities inherent in a given genome into diachronic actualities or linear narratives. Clayton himself regards narrative time as “the opposite of genome time.” 10 In the light of this brief sketch of our ‘genomic imaginary’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century, an interesting task emerges for literary scholars interested in the interrelationship of cultural and literary change. Because of the obvious implications that the sequencing of the genome - including its cultural representations as ‘text’ or ‘book’ - has for the ways in which human beings conceive of and narrate their lives, it appears meaningful to inquire how cultural communication about the genome gives rise to new forms of ‘life writing.’ What one is concerned with here are “the cultural dynamics of generic change,” 11 My essay will investigate this question in section two by discussing the emergence of ‘genomic life writing’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century as an instance of generic change. The examples presented in this section are no literary fictions, but we will later see that a clear-cut distinction between fact and fiction appears somewhat problematic in the case of genomic life writing. In section three, I will discuss Richard Powers’ experimental novel Generosity: An Enhancement (2009), reading the text as a prime reprethat is, broadly speaking, the question of how cultural change, such as the completion of the human genome and its symbolic mediations, can lead to changes within the system of genres. 7 See Steven Pinker, “My Genome, My Self,” The New York Times Magazine, 7 January 2009. http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2009/ 01/ 11/ magazine/ 11Genome-t.html (last retrieved on March 2, 2016). 8 Jay Clayton, “Genome Time,” Time and the Literary, eds. Karen Newman, Jay Clayton, Marianne Hirsch (New York/ London: Routledge, 2002), 33, 35. 9 Clayton 33. 10 Clayton 50. 11 See Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nünning, Christine Schwanecke, eds., The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction: Theoretical Frameworks, Genres and Model Interpretations (Trier: WVT, 2013a). A LEXANDER S CHERR 124 sentative of the literary genre that Everett Hamner has aptly called “genomic fiction.” 12 The main goal of the analysis is to argue that Powers’ novel is not only fundamentally concerned with genomic science and its public representations, but also with the epistemological difficulties of making human lives ‘narratable.’ More specifically, I will show that Generosity manages to problematize genomic life stories by exposing the ways in which genomic science is always already entangled in economic regimes that require it to produce marketable narratives. Such “tales from the genome,” to use Lander’s phrase, are presently produced, first and foremost, by so-called “direct-to-consumer genome scanning services.” 13 2. Generic Change: The Emergence of ‘Genomic Life Writing’ at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century These companies engage in the production of ‘genomic life writing’ - a term which I use to refer to the emergence of a new genre in contemporary Western cultures that is itself indicative of cultural change. As such, it is to be reviewed in the following section. In order to arrive at a better understanding of the inter-dynamics between cultural and literary change, the category of ‘generic change’ can play a helpful intermediary role. More specifically, by putting forward the genre label of ‘genomic life writing,’ which is meant to refer to the formation of new narrative forms in the wider domain of life writing at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, I propose that there is a close interrelationship between scientific knowledge acquired about the genome and (auto-)biographical storytelling practices. In a recent article on “Life Sciences and Life Writing,” Alfred Hornung has called attention to the alliance that can be posited to exist between the two phenomena alluded to in the title of his essay. Taking autobiographies and autobiographical fiction by David Suzuki, E.O. Wilson and Siri Hustvedt as his examples, Hornung sheds light on the interaction between the life sciences and life writing. However, whereas Hornung’s article convincingly argues for “the advantage of life writing for the presentation of scientific ideas to a larger audience in publications or on TV,” 14 12 Everett Hamner, “The Predisposed Agency of Genomic Fiction,” American Literature 83.2 (2011): 413-41. it is also possible to investigate in what ways the life sciences, and genomic science in particular, can bring about modifications in the genre of life writing itself. This approach opens up perspectives for studying “the cultural dynamics of generic change,” to cite the title of a collection edited by Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nünning and Chris- 13 See also O’Riordan 119. 14 Alfred Hornung, “Life Sciences and Life Writing,” Anglia 133.1 (2015): 37. Genomic Life Writing and Genomic Fiction 125 tine Schwanecke. As the editors point out in their introduction, research in this field focuses upon “the question of how genres are determined not only by changes within the literary system but also by extra-literary, e.g., cultural, economic, and social factors and contexts.” 15 In so doing, the study of generic change responds to a question pointedly raised by Heta Pyrhönen in her article on “Genre” in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative: “What accounts for shifts and changes within a genre? ” 16 Pyrhönen herself provides a valuable starting point for tackling this question, emphasizing the significance of both “modifications within the literary system” and “the impact of the larger socio-cultural context.” 17 Moreover, as Basseler, Nünning and Schwanecke add, “new genres are likely to occur at challenging cultural moments, fostering and engendering change within and beyond the literary system.” 18 With regard to the significance of the socio-cultural context for the particular phenomenon focused upon in the present essay, I would like to suggest that scientific knowledge about the genome has manifested itself in two different forms of genomic life writing: On the one hand, there are genotyping services like 23andMe or Oxford Ancestors Ltd, which offer their clients knowledge about their genetic and personal identity and thus inevitably partake in the making of life narratives. Since such companies promise reliable insights into one’s genetic roots, one might refer to the stories they offer as the ‘realist’ strand in non-fictional genomic life writing: The way in which they market their research suggests that genotyping companies can help people to ‘complete’ their life stories, but this also implies that these stories are already there, readable as “tales from the genome.” On the other hand, several scientists, journalists and authors - Richard Powers being one of them - have had their genomes fully sequenced and written about their individual experiences. This type of genomic life writing is more ‘essayistic’ from the outset, as the authors’ accounts include explanations of genomic testing itself as well as their intellectual and emotional experiences during the process. Such essays are not so much straightforward ‘tales’ than meditations on the In line with this assertion, it was already suggested in this essay that the beginning of the new millennium can be regarded as such a crucial historical juncture, given the proliferation of research in the life sciences and the revival of scriptural metaphors in public discourses about genomic research. 15 Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nünning, Christine Schwanecke, “The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change: Surveying Kinds and Problems of Literary History and Accounting for the Development of Genres,” The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction: Theoretical Frameworks, Genres and Model Interpretations, eds. Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nünning, Christine Schwanecke (Trier: WVT, 2013b), 1. 16 Heta Pyrhönen, “Genre,” The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ed. David Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 119. 17 Pyrhönen 122. 18 Basseler, Nünning, Schwanecke, “The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change,” 12. A LEXANDER S CHERR 126 premises of genomic research and life writing, and, as such, they inevitably raise epistemological questions. Both the realist and the essayistic form of genomic life writing testify to Kate O’Riordan’s thesis that genome scanning services can be thought of as “narrative machines.” 19 Even if a comprehensive review of the kind of life writing associated with genotyping services is beyond the scope of this essay, a glance at the website of the California-based company 23andMe reveals to what extent genetic sequencing has become “a technology of stories about genetics, health, and behavior,” Nevertheless, they vary considerably with regard to the ways in which they frame the relationship between genomic information, on the one hand, and storytelling practices, on the other. I will review the two forms of genomic life writing in the following, showing that especially the essayistic strand provides valuable intellectual perspectives for the discussion of Powers’ novel, while the realist form represents a kind of life writing of which Generosity is inherently critical. 20 but also about personal identities. To clarify, companies like 23andMe scan a certain (comparatively small) percentage of people’s genomes with the primary aim of better understanding the nature of genetic diseases and of being able to suggest individualized medical treatment. But they also offer identity-related services: In a section entitled “Everyday people. Extraordinary stories,” potential clients are invited to “[s]ee how knowing more about your DNA can impact your life.” 21 A different, and potentially more reflective, form of genomic life writing manifests itself in autobiographical essays written by authors who have had Accordingly, the website presents the reader with a number of success stories of former clients who have acquired an amount of self-knowledge thanks to DNA analysis they could not otherwise have attained. The stories exhibited on the website feature various people who have all used 23andMe “to learn more about themselves.” In some cases, the company has enabled clients to connect with family members of whose existence they had previously been unaware. In other cases, 23andMe has provided customers with knowledge regarding their “ethnic make-up” or their “ancestral origins.” It is thus possible for clients to obtain information about how much “Neanderthal DNA” lives on in them, or to discover their “unique history from over 750 maternal lineages and over 500 paternal lineages” - services which evidently evoke the dimensions of genome time. Even if it could certainly be questioned how informative such knowledge actually is, the impression one receives from the website is that 23andMe can help people to complete their life stories and to understand who they really are. 19 O’Riordan 121. 20 O’Riordan 119. 21 This and the following quotations in this paragraph are all cited from the company’s official website: www.23andme.com (last retrieved on March 2, 2016). Genomic Life Writing and Genomic Fiction 127 their genomes sequenced. Among the writers who have produced such essayistic accounts are Steven Pinker and Richard Powers, who both participated in the Personal Genome Project (PGP) initiated by the Harvard geneticist George M. Church. 22 Pinker, for one, is generally known as an outspoken public advocate of scientific research in general, and of evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics in particular. Nevertheless, his outlook on genomic testing in “My Genome, My Self,” which appeared in The New York Times in January 2009, is fairly ambivalent. On the one hand, the essay reveals that Pinker is a believer in scientific progress who looks at genome sequencing as a democratic technology that will enable people to “read their essence as a printout detailing their very own A’s, C’s, T’s and G’s”; all of this will be possible one day “for the price of a flat-screen TV.” The titles of their essays - Pinker’s “My Genome, My Self” (2009) and Powers’ “The Book of Me” (2008) - already indicate in what sense genome sequencing can be thought of as an autobiographical technology. However, the two essays are not only autobiographical; they are also intellectual engagements with both the possibilities and limits of genome sequencing, and the question of what this technology means with regard to the ways in which we write our lives. This is what also turns them into highly relevant contexts for the interpretation of Powers’ Generosity. 23 Moreover, he attributes a certain liberating impulse to genomic science, arguing that, “[w]ith the genome no less than with the Internet, information wants to be free” instead of being stifled by “paternalistic measures.” 24 But Pinker’s essay also displays critical potential, especially to the extent that it cautions against understanding the genome as a form of selfknowledge and, in that sense, as the revelation of our life narratives. In this context, he also details in what sense the relationship between genomic information and life writing is fraught from the beginning. Recalling his attempt to use the sequence information as a source of self-knowledge, Pinker concedes that the result was a sobering one: “For all the narcissistic pleasure The underlying implication of a statement like this is that scientific progress will come sooner or later, anyway, and that there is no need for restrictive politics. This way of positioning the two domains against one another is in danger of declaring politics superfluous while rendering science as an irresistible and objective force of progress. The implied conclusion that science could itself act as an improved and ‘nonideological’ manifestation of politics strikes me as problematic, and we will later see that it is questioned by Powers in both his essay and his novel. 22 The difference between the PGP and genotyping companies like 23andMe is that the former sequences the complete genomes of its participants while the latter only analyze a relatively minimal amount of DNA. 23 Pinker online. 24 Ibid. A LEXANDER S CHERR 128 that comes from poring over clues to my inner makeup, I soon realized that I was using my knowledge of myself to make sense of the genetic readout, not the other way around.” 25 This statement suggests that narrative is not simply secondary to the genome, but an indispensable tool for its interpretation from the very beginning. The idea of the genome as a reliable source of life writing gives way to a picture of its relationship to narrative as one that is marked much more by recursion, as Kate O’Riordan shrewdly observes: “All life writing is recursive in the sense that it refers back to and draws upon the life that it narrates. Genomic life stories are endlessly recursive tales that loop through a series of tellings about my genome, myself, my life, and my genomic life writing.” 26 As O’Riordan further explains, the important insight to be gained from this observation is that, “[w]hile genomes are a technology of story, they are not by themselves stories. Genome sequences or scans have to be narrated through annotation, commentary, interpretation, and explanation, in relation to the life of the protagonist.” 27 Since the novel is fairly experimental in its literary style, the interpretation might further benefit from some insights into genomic life writing to be gleaned from Powers’ essay “The Book of Me,” which appeared in GQ magazine in September 2008, about a year before Generosity was first published. Similar to Pinker’s account, the essay details Powers’ personal experiences (and emotional struggles) with genomic testing, including his conversations with George Church, the director of the Personal Genome Project. Powers goes into virtually all of the prospects, hopes and social concerns associated with genomic research. He thematizes his worries about genomics as “the new juggernaut created by embedding commerce so deeply into experimental research, and vice versa,” We will see in section three that Powers’ novel Generosity capitalizes on the epistemological problem of recursion in the making of (genomic) life narratives in various ways. 28 as much as his concerns regarding the biopolitical consequences of genomic research. Accordingly, Powers poses the question “if we aren’t in danger of pathologizing ordinary health” as a result of our knowledge about potential future illnesses, “turning us all into pre-patients for diseases we are only at a risk of contracting.” 29 25 Ibid. All of these issues would later resurface in Generosity in one way or another, but my present interest is in the aspects Powers’ essay addresses with regard to the implications of genomic research for the project of life writing. 26 O’Riordan 128. 27 O’Riordan 129. 28 Richard Powers, “The Book of Me,” GQ, 30 September 2008. http: / / www.gq.com/ story/ richard-powers-genome-sequence? currentPage=11 (last retrieved on March 2, 2016). 29 Ibid. Genomic Life Writing and Genomic Fiction 129 That Powers displays strong interest in these questions is already emphasized by the fact that the GQ website on which the essay has been published features an image of a typewriter producing a printout with linguistic content arranged in the form of a double helix. The picture thus clearly suggests that the ‘genome’ and ‘writing’ are caught up in a highly recursive relationship: The genomic text presumably authors a life, but the typewriter indicates that this text has itself been authored: Somebody must have typed it. Moreover, by naming two of the sections in the essay “climax” and “denouement,” Powers evokes a structure for his experience with genomic testing that is reminiscent of ancient Greek drama. Indeed, the author draws a rather obvious connection between the genomic agenda of making the future predictable and the role of the Oracle in ancient tragedies: Stripped to its essential plot, the personal genome is a story of management. It’s the latest expression of an ancient obsession, one favored by natural selection and coded by our genes. We have dreamed, from the beginning, of intercepting our destiny before we reach it. But this story’s mode is still prophecy. The hero consults the Oracle in order to circumvent the information the Oracle gives him. Unfortunately, nine times out of ten, the hero can’t tell what the hell the Oracle is saying until the murk comes true and reveals how to read it. 30 What Powers is suggesting here is that interpretation can never be innocently retrieved from any given text, especially not from one that is as ambivalent and enigmatic - at least for the time being - as the genome. For obvious reasons, it is much easier to interpret the text if we already know the story, which brings to mind Steven Pinker’s experience with his genetic readout. Another aspect in which Powers’ essay provides insightful perspectives on the idea of genomic life writing concerns the moment when people are confronted with their own genomic ‘text,’ holding the printout with the results of their testing in front of them like a ‘book.’ Powers explains the logic of this moment - the specific kind of temporality that characterizes it - with reference to Peter Brooks’ classic study Reading for the Plot (1984): In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks suggests that “our chief tool in making sense of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic,” is “the anticipation of retrospection.” Page one means what it means only because we already know that page 300 is going to change it forever. […] I wonder if getting my personal genome turns me into one of those contemptible readers who stand around in bookstores browsing the last pages before they decide whether or not it’s worth picking up a book. 31 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. The original quotation in Brooks’ Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1984), 23, reads: “Perhaps we would do best to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic.” A LEXANDER S CHERR 130 In this passage, Powers takes the metaphor of the genome as ‘book’ seriously - but only to reveal its limitations. The analogy he foregrounds is that the genome is a totality of information, much like a novel is to the extent that it gives the reader the impression of having an end-point - a certain number of pages, but no more. However, the logic of recursion strikes again as Powers makes clear that the lived experience of human beings faced with the entirety of their genetic information is not reducible to the genomic ‘text’ as such: The highly individual emotional reaction to the genome sequence already marks a development in one’s life narrative that is not part of the printout. Accordingly, Powers reports how he felt shaky after the announcement that he did not have any single-gene disorders, “realizing what a different article this would have been if [he] had.” 32 This assessment clearly indicates that the genome sequence is “a technology for autobiography” for Powers, too. 33 3. Literary Change: Richard Powers’ Novel Generosity: An Enhancement (2009) as a Representative of Contemporary ‘Genomic Fiction’ Yet, other than with the impression one receives from the 23andMe website, the essay stresses that the technology of genomic testing does not make the telling of a life easier but rather complicates it. It is this insight that will turn out to be a helpful entry point for the interpretation of Powers’ novel. The felicitous genre label of ‘genomic fiction’ has been suggested by Everett Hamner for literary works which, broadly speaking, “may engage genomic testing, modification, or cloning,” or which “may imagine themselves as rigorous forms of scientific self-representation or utilize scientific possibilities only superficially en route to other concerns.” 34 Hamner finds important precursors of the genre in novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953). But he also explains that “in the wake of the Human Genome Project’s 2003 completion, slipstream treatments of genomic identity have been multiplying beyond the genre shelves.” 35 32 Powers online. Apart from Powers’ Generosity: An Enhancement, one might think of such highly popular and renowned works as, for example, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), or Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2003- 2013). Hamner’s emphasis on issues of “genomic identity” already suggests 33 O’Riordan 125. 34 Hamner 420. 35 Ibid. Genomic Life Writing and Genomic Fiction 131 possible connections to life writing as one of the paramount human practices in which identities and ‘selves’ are negotiated. Focusing on both cultural change and the idea of genomic life writing, as outlined in the first two sections of this contribution, my main aim in the following is to discuss Powers’ Generosity as a prime representative of contemporary genomic fiction in two senses: Firstly, I intend to show that the novel illustrates the various dimensions of cultural change brought about by the possibilities of sequencing complete human genomes. Secondly, I will argue that the text performs literary change with regard to its formal and stylistic features. We will see that the experimental aesthetics of the novel can be interpreted to be a result of its engagement with both genomics and life writing. Generally speaking, one may not be surprised about the fact that a novel penned by Richard Powers engages in some sort of cultural diagnosis, paying special attention to the social impacts of scientific inventions and technologies. Commentators on his fiction have emphasized the sense of ‘interconnectedness’ it almost always conveys. Kathryn Hume, for instance, has argued that Powers’ novels advance their readers’ understanding of “the networked nature of reality,” 36 even if the picture of society painted in these novels is frequently rather bleak. As Hume puts it: “Not only is his vision too dark to admit much improvement, his grasp of all the social vectors lets him ground such pessimism on a myriad of facts - economic, technological, and related to the structure of the brain and mind. The interconnectedness of everything makes his world very difficult to change.” 37 It is therefore not really surprising that Powers has been called “the novelist of ‘science studies’” by no other than one of the most eminent representatives of the discipline, the French sociologist Bruno Latour. 38 Latour has shown in his works how science and society are intertwined to the extent that ‘facts’ and ‘knowledge’ are always coproduced in complex social networks that involve various actors. According to his analysis, science cannot be placed outside of society but, on the contrary, is always already entangled with political and economic interests and therefore necessarily ‘hybrid.’ As Latour phrases it at the beginning of his essay We Have Never Been Modern, for scholars of science studies this means that they “are always attempting to retie the Gordian knot by crisscrossing […] the divide that separates exact knowledge and the exercise of power - let us say nature and 36 Kathryn Hume, “Moral Problematics in the Novels of Richard Powers,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54 (2013): 7. 37 Hume 6. 38 Bruno Latour, “Powers of the Facsimile: A Turing Test on Science and Literature,” Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, eds. Stephen J. Burn, Peter Dempsey (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), 264. A LEXANDER S CHERR 132 culture.” 39 Karin Höpker has convincingly brought Latour’s philosophy of science to bear on her reading of Generosity. More specifically, she argues that the fictional text explores “the new mode of technoscientific knowledge production after a significant epistemic shift in scientific practice.” 40 In order to show to what extent Generosity displays awareness of ongoing cultural change with regard to scientific practices, a brief plot summary seems helpful. This epistemic shift is fundamentally connected to the nature of genomic research, which is not only caught up in both science and commerce, but which has also modified the practices of life writing in contemporary Western societies. 41 The novel features as its main focalizer the character of Russell Stone, a writing instructor at Mesquakie College of Art in Chicago, but the plot gains momentum with the introduction of Thassadit Amzwar, a participant in Russell’s class, who is a veritable enigma to her teacher and to everybody who makes her acquaintance. What perplexes the people surrounding Thassa is the relentless amount of joyfulness the 23-year-old woman displays - in spite of the fact that she is a refugee from the Algerian civil war, in which she lost both of her parents. Bewitching all of her peers and Russell alike, Thassa soon becomes “Miss Generosity” (28) in the writing class, but an even bigger narrative concerning her identity is already in the making: As her case becomes more and more public, Thassa attracts the interest of the genomicist Thomas Kurton and his private company Truecyte. For the scientist, the young woman is a potential “missing datum” (138) insofar as she might support his thesis that happiness and emotional well-being are predetermined by our genetic make-up. However, the novel illustrates that Kurton’s research is entangled with economic interests that govern the production of scientific knowledge from the beginning. Thassa is not only gradually turned into “the fetishized object of a mass hysteria,” 42 39 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge/ MA, London: Harvard UP, 1993 [1991]), 3. acquiring increasing popularity as “the Bliss Chick” (110). Kurton also participates in the public marketing of Thassa’s personality because his research is documented in a science edutainment show entitled “The Genie and the Genome.” As Thassa’s case becomes more and more public, she gets “hounded by the hungry, clutched by the desperate, reduced by the scientific, dissected by the newshounds, stoned by the religious, bid on by the entrepreneurs, denounced by the disappointed” (304). Being finally unable to stand the pub- 40 Karin Höpker, “Happiness in Distress - Richard Powers’ Generosity and Narratives of the Biomedical Self,” Ideas of Order: Narrative Patterns in the Novels of Richard Powers, eds. Antje Kley, Jan Kucharzewski (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012), 288. 41 Citations from the novel will be given in the text. They are based on the following edition of the novel: Richard Powers, Generosity: An Enhancement (New York: Picador, 2009). 42 Höpker 288. Genomic Life Writing and Genomic Fiction 133 lic pressure, Thassa chooses to preserve a last bit of agency by committing suicide. She is redeemed in a second ending, in which the narrator writes Thassa back to life and has her return to Algeria, where her daughter is born. This plot overview corroborates Höpker’s observation that “Generosity speaks to […] the structural, economic, social, and disciplinary ramifications of scientific knowledge production” in an age that is dominated by the Internet, social media and TV culture. 43 The novel as a whole does not really seem to answer this question in the affirmative, as the topos of the ‘scriptedness’ of lives is brought up again and again in the text. Accordingly, not only Russell himself has to “figh[t] the sense of being scripted” (81). Much to his regret, he also realizes that Thassa’s narrative is determined by social forces beyond his control. As the narrator puts it: Similar to Steven Pinker’s case, where autobiographical self-knowledge precedes the interpretation of genetic data, in Generosity it is the narratives about Thassa in edutainment shows, talk shows and online reportage that narrativize Kurton’s research into a search for the “happiness gene” long before Thassa actually agrees to genomic testing. Hence, a seminal question which Generosity provokes is who is in charge of the telling of Thassa’s narrative, and by implication of all genomic life writing in our society. Thassa invokes this question herself in one of her reflective moments, asking Russell whether “[he] think[s] it’s possible for people to change their own story” (92). He [Russell] knows this story. You know this story: Thassa will be taken away from him. Other interests will lay claim. His charge will become public property. He might have kept quiet and learned from her, captured her in his journal, shared a few words at the end of his allotted four months, then returned to real life, slightly changed. A vaguely midlist literary story. But he’s doomed himself by calling in the expert. It’s his own fault, for thinking that Thassa’s joy must mean something, for imagining that such a plot has to go somewhere, that something has to happen. (93-94) Powers’ novel thus indicates that the story of Thassa’s personality has neither been hers nor Russell’s from the beginning. Instead, it is a highly interwoven story that emerges as an accomplishment of various actors, which include the genomicist Kurton as much as the documentary filmmaker Tonia Schiff, Thassa herself and the anonymous third-person narrator whose identity is only revealed at the end of the book - a twist I will return to in due course. Life writing has obviously become a difficult practice in Powers’ postgenomic world. In fact, his novel could be read as a meditation on life writing itself, which it even renders as a potentially violent act. In this context, Kathryn Hume aptly observes that “Generosity is in part about how we consume for casual entertainment not only popular science but also people like 43 Höpker 300. A LEXANDER S CHERR 134 Thassadit; she became a momentary celebrity and has her life seriously damaged into an envied spectacle.” 44 In addition to the network of actors involved in the making of Thassa’s narrative, Generosity invites a radical approach to the question of how (all) scientific knowledge is produced in contemporary media societies. The text introduces a Darwinian stance on the nature of knowledge, in that questions of the truth of scientific hypotheses appear subordinated under matters of ‘survival’ within the scientific community. The parameters of survival, again, are determined by the various interdependencies between genomic science, the companies funding its research, and the mass media in which findings are narrativized and disseminated. The narrator explains the logic of knowledge production in a passage in which the publication of scientific theories is rendered in a sociobiological light: In one of the most drastic scenes in the novel, the wish to control Thassa’s life culminates in an attempted (but unsuccessful) rape. This criminal act, committed by one of the woman’s classmates, certainly carries symbolic force far beyond the plot level. It is a blatant metaphorical representation of an individual life’s subjection under external powers of (narrative) control, of which Generosity is generally suspicious. Even Russell himself is not completely innocent of having appropriated other people’s lives under his narrative regime in the past: At the beginning of the novel (cf. 14-16), we learn of a Native American man who once attempted to take his own life, possibly because he had been misrepresented in one of Russell’s articles. Viewed in this light, life writing appears more as an imposition of meaning than an accurate reproduction of a given person’s ‘story,’ which is never really there in the first place. All research gambles against time. Kurton calls it hunting the mastodon. An unruly band with sticks and stones stalks a creature larger than all of them combined. Hang back and lose the prey; rush too soon and get gored. Smart risks live to reproduce; poor ones die off. Thomas Kurton excels at research because his ancestors stalked well. (130) The image of science that the reader is presented with in this passage is that “truth is red in tooth and claw” (211), as the narrator puts it elsewhere. It is strongly suggested that since Truecyte is “a private company […], accountable to no one but their investors” (212), the maxim of Kurton’s actions is to secure the company’s survival in a highly competitive environment. The production of knowledge is always secondary to the Darwinian imperative. Accordingly, the factors which govern the decision to go public with one’s findings include “timing in relation to [the] research of others, hedging of risk, optimizing of economic impact.” 45 44 Hume 3. While such economic and social fac- 45 Höpker 302. Genomic Life Writing and Genomic Fiction 135 tors have always affected the question of whether a scientific theory could take hold in the community or not, Generosity asserts that “the technoscientific networks of knowledge production” are even more interwoven in the post-genomic age. 46 In order to see that Generosity performs literary change with regard to its own novelistic style, Heike Schäfer has argued that we need to look no further than its subtitle. While the idea of “Enhancement” certainly alludes to the novel’s thematic concerns, Schäfer points out that the notion is strikingly placed at a position where we usually expect the generic marker ‘A Novel.’ She thus proposes that the subtitle can be taken “to suggest that Powers’ most recent book offers an ‘enhancement’ of the novel tradition,” The novel’s narrator diagnoses this facet of cultural change in a similar way, following up on the above-cited narrative of scientific research: “The mastodon has evolved. It’s a whole new elephant” (212). The implications for scientific research are dire: Kurton may have perfected his philosophy of science, given the economic success of his private company, but the Darwinian picture also suggests that all knowledge claimed by science must remain somewhat insecure and transitional. This cultural diagnosis affects the form in which Powers’ narrative presents itself to the reader in a very fundamental sense. 47 which constitutes a highly self-conscious proclamation of literary change. The reasons for the novel to ‘enhance itself’ may partly be found in the changed media ecology, especially in the “emergence of an information culture shaped by social media and TV,” 48 which Powers’ text thematizes. From this vantage point, the key question to which the novel needs to find an answer is nicely phrased by Schäfer in the following way: “[H]ow can literary culture break out of the mold of inherited rules and conventions and reinvent itself in order to remain relevant to the lives of its authors and readers in the age of consumer genomics, commercial TV, and social media? ” 49 Generosity’s attempt to preserve the cultural authority of the novel interestingly moves into the opposite direction of what Paul Dawson has identified as a major trend in contemporary fiction in a widely received article: “the return of omniscience,” 50 which Dawson marks as “one response by writers to the decline of literary authority.” 51 46 Ibid. Yet, given the fact that Powers displays 47 Heike Schäfer, “The Pursuit of Happiness 2.0: Consumer Genomics, Social Media, and the Promise of Literary Innovation in Richard Powers’s Novel Generosity (2009),” Ideas of Order: Narrative Patterns in the Novels of Richard Powers, eds. Antje Kley, Jan Kucharzewski (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012), 264. 48 Schäfer 263. 49 Schäfer 268. 50 See Paul Dawson, “The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction,” Narrative 17.2 (2009): 143-161. 51 Dawson 150. A LEXANDER S CHERR 136 a cautious attitude towards the making of premature narratives about both people’s genomes and their lives, one may already surmise that neither omniscience nor traditional realism are serious options for him as an author. Instead, Generosity puts the idea of “creative nonfiction” centre stage, which is also the topic of Russell’s writing class on the novel’s story level. One might suggest, then, that the very idea of creative nonfiction, with its “paradoxical orientation towards both fact and fiction,” 52 embodies the epistemological insecurity with which we presently stand in front of the genome as text. As Powers remarks at the end of his essay “The Book of Me”: “[T]he dream of molecular management notwithstanding, we are unthinkably far away from ever being able to control the story. The impenetrable texts will have their way with us, in the end.” 53 A general sense of insecurity regarding the making of narratives manifests itself in a range of aesthetic strategies in Generosity; their effects are best described as ‘metanarrative’ and ‘metafictional.’ Since Powers conceives of genomes as ‘texts’ that escape the control of individual authors, his novel adopts a style that could be called elusive or even ‘genomic’ in precisely this sense. 54 At the beginning of the novel, for example, the narrator is reluctant to prematurely ascribe any kind of identity to the as yet unnamed Russell: “I can’t see him well, at first. But that’s my fault, not his. I’m years away, in another country, and the El car is so full tonight that everyone’s near invisible. […] The blank page is patient, and meaning can wait. I watch until he solidifies” (3). Toon Staes is therefore right in observing that we are dealing with a narrator who self-consciously realizes that “this is a narrative beyond his absolute control.” 55 52 Schäfer 276. What is more, due to its metafictional mode of narration, the text constantly leaves the reader in doubt about which of the reported events have the status of the actual and which are merely possible or misapprehended by the narrator. Other than the documentaries, talk shows and online media referenced on the story level, all of which are quick to narrativize Thassa into the “Bliss Chick,” the narrator’s own stance on teleological trajectories is much more 53 Powers, “The Book of Me,” online. 54 While ‘metanarration’ and ‘metafiction’ are sometimes used synonymously, I follow the proposal to distinguish between the two concepts, as put forward by Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning in their entry on “Metanarration and Metafiction” for the Handbook of Narratology, eds. Peter Hühn et al. (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2014 [2009]), 344-352. The terminological distinction makes sense because metanarrative passages need not necessarily be metafictional or ‘anti-illusionistic,’ but can also support the production of an aesthetic illusion on the part of the reader. In the case of Powers’ novel, however, instances of metanarration are mostly used to problematize the representational accuracy of all life writing and thus metafictional in their effect. Narration is continuously presented in a critical light in Generosity. 55 Toon Staes, “The Fictionality Debate and the Complex Texts of Richard Powers and William T. Vollmann,” Neophilologus 98 (2014): 184. Genomic Life Writing and Genomic Fiction 137 ambiguous, as he even considers the very concept of ‘plot’ as “preposterous”: “He could never survive the responsibility of making something happen” (297). Accordingly, the aesthetics of realism are explicitly rejected by the narrator: “Realism - the whole threadbare patch job of consoling conventions - is like one of those painkillers that gets you addicted without helping anything. In reality, a million things happen all at once for no good reason, until some idiot texting on his cell plows into you on the expressway in northern Indiana” (297-298). In the light of the critique of literary realism issued in the novel itself, I would argue that Powers’ style, which “renders impossible any easy distinction between events that ‘actually happened’ and those relying on ‘creativity with the facts,’” embraces a cautious stance on life writing. In particular, it can be interpreted as a reaction to the assertive “tales from the genome,” whose reliability the fictional genomicist Kurton seems to promote as much as the marketing strategies of genotyping companies like 23andMe intend to make their customers believe. Hamner arrives at a similar conclusion in his reading of Generosity, arguing that “Powers is striving for a fiction that operates quite oppositely to dogma, a hybridized creative nonfiction in which metanarratival layers are not just aesthetic glosses but critical elements for making and then unmaking mythology.” 56 A careful attitude towards life writing is not only expressed with regard to the character of Thassa. In fact, the problem of writing (or ‘predicting’) a person’s life applies to Russell himself, as the writing instructor turns out to be the previously anonymous narrator of the novel at the end of the story. This twist in the novel’s design leaves ample room for interpretation, but it seems to make sense, in the light of the previous discussion, to attribute the following three functions to it: For one thing, the revelation that the narrator has been writing about himself in third person - and the self-distancing effect of this strategy - confirm how hesitant Russell is about subordinating any human life prematurely under a regime of narrative interpretation, even the one he should know best. Secondly, as Hamner astutely observes, “recognizing Russell as narrator makes the entire novel into a record of its own composition - rather like the human genome.” 57 56 Hamner 438. See also Schäfer 270, who offers a similar explanation for why Powers is suspicious of literary realism: “The transparency effects of realist writing are problematic […] because they allow omniscient narrators to push totalizing accounts of reality that conceal their ideological investment in certain metanarratives. This typically postmodern critique of realism is relevant for the novel’s critical appraisal of current scientific discourse because Kurton’s consumer genomics perpetuate the old metanarrative of human progress through unbridled scientific and technological invention without considering the human and environmental costs of its historical precedents.” Thus, the idea of the genome as a record of genetic information that has been rewritten again and again in the course of evolution also matches up with an explanation Russell gives his 57 Hamner 436. A LEXANDER S CHERR 138 students in the writing class: “All writing is rewriting” (37) and, in this sense, inherently recursive. Thirdly, the logic of recursion can be connected to Peter Brooks’ principle of the ‘anticipation of retrospection,’ upon which Powers reflects in his essay in GQ magazine. Accordingly, one might argue that Generosity, much more than linear narratives do, encourages a re-reading of the novel that allows us to experience Powers’ enigmatic - or even ‘genomic’ - text in a new light, once we have acquired the knowledge of its ending. The idea of recursion is highlighted symbolically, last but not least, by means of the Möbius strips that are inserted as glyphs between the individual sections of the novel. 58 4. Conclusion: Cultural, Generic and Literary Change in Powers’ Fiction Powers thus presents an understanding of life writing in his novel that defies the idea of an Archimedean vantage point for the telling of life narratives. The genome in itself cannot provide people with a stable sense of identity - it is rather one factor among many in the continual rewriting of human biographies. This essay has put forward a reading of Powers’ Generosity as a novel that diagnoses ‘cultural change,’ while actively engaging in ‘literary change.’ These two aspects must be seen as closely intertwined since the kind of cultural change the novel diagnoses - a modified information culture in which knowledge about the human genome is disseminated in edutainment shows and on the Internet - immediately affects the authority of the novel. I have included the aspect of ‘generic change’ in the previous discussion, as the emergence of new forms of genomic life writing testifies to “a significant epistemic shift in scientific practice” in the wake of the completion of the first human reference genome at the beginning of the new millennium. 59 58 See also Hamner 437. However, in order to preserve the cultural authority of the novel as a highly reflective form of life writing, Generosity moves into the opposite direction of the “tales from the genome” marketed by fictional genomicists like Kurton and actual genotyping companies like 23andMe. In terms of literary style, this orientation results in the form of ‘creative nonfiction,’ which renders a straightforward distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in the making of lives as problematic from the outset. With reference to Hubert Zapf’s triadic model of the functions of literary texts within wider cultural ecologies, one might therefore conclude that Powers’ Generosity adopts the function of a “culturalcritical metadiscourse” in its relation to the kind of life writing promoted by 59 Höpker 288. Genomic Life Writing and Genomic Fiction 139 some personal genomics and biotechnology companies. 60 Viewed in its entirety, Powers’ stance on the genome as the ‘book of life’ appears ambivalent. While the conceptualization of the genome as ‘text’ or ‘book’ is far from being uncontested among scientists, who have long begun to explore new metaphorical registers in their understanding of the genome (for example, by speaking of the ‘mapping’ of genes), Powers generally takes the metaphor seriously, both in his essay and his novel. In “The Book of Me,” he seems rather unanimous about the fact that holding the printout of a genome sequence in one’s hands inevitably provides one with an uncanny ‘anticipation of retrospection,’ no matter how much of the information can meaningfully be decoded at present. But Powers also strongly suggests that genomes are still largely “impenetrable” texts for us. Most importantly, “they are not by themselves stories,” especially to the extent that their interpretation is reliant upon pre-existing life narratives with which genetic data must be correlated in order to be rendered meaningful at all. When confronted with enigmatic or ‘genomic’ texts (in the widest sense), we may therefore wish to follow the advice with which Powers concludes his essay: “Get literate. Read wider. Read deeper. Read more variously, more critically, more suspiciously, more vicariously. Read in anticipation of retrospection. Page one is already being changed by all the pages still to come.” In particular, the novel questions the assertiveness with which these companies promise to ‘complete’ their customers’ life stories, rendering the writing of a life instead as a highly difficult - and even potentially violent - task. 61 60 Cf. Hubert Zapf, “Das Funktionsmodell der Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Imaginative Texte im Spannungsfeld von Dekonstruktion und Regeneration,” Funktionen von Literatur: Theoretische Grundlagen und Modellinterpretationen, eds. Marion Gymnich, Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2005), 55-77. With regard to the function of the ‘cultural-critical metadiscourse,‘ see Zapf 68: “Hier spielt vor allem der Monopolanspruch zivilisationsbestimmender Realitäts- und Diskurssysteme eine wichtige Rolle, in denen einseitighierarchische Oppositionen wie Geist vs. Körper, Vernunft vs. Emotion, Eigenes vs. Anderes, Ordnung vs. Chaos, Kultur vs. Natur vorherrschen und die tiefgreifende Entfremdungseffekte im ‚biophilen,’ psychologisch-anthropologischen Grundhaushalt des Menschen hervorrufen. Diese Systeme werden auf eine Weise repräsentiert, dass sie zugleich dekonstruiert werden […].” 61 Powers, “The Book of Me,” online. A LEXANDER S CHERR 140 Works Cited 23andMe. www.23andme.com (last retrieved on March 2, 2016). Basseler, Michael, Ansgar Nünning, and Christine Schwanecke, eds. The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction: Theoretical Frameworks, Genres and Model Interpretations. Trier: WVT, 2013a. Basseler, Michael, Ansgar Nünning, and Christine Schwanecke. “The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change: Surveying Kinds and Problems of Literary History and Accounting for the Development of Genres.” The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction: Theoretical Frameworks, Genres and Model Interpretations. Eds. Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nünning, Christine Schwanecke. Trier: WVT, 2013b, 1-40. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage, 1984. Clayton, Jay. “Genome Time.” Time and the Literary. Eds. Karen Newman, Jay Clayton, Marianne Hirsch. New York, London: Routledge, 2002, 31-59. Dawson, Paul. “The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction.” Narrative 17.2 (2009): 143-161. Franklin, Sarah. “Life Itself: Global Nature, Global Culture.” Global Nature, Global Culture. Eds. Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, Jackie Stacey. London: Sage, 2000, 188- 227. Hamner, Everett. “The Predisposed Agency of Genomic Fiction.” American Literature 83.2 (2011), 413-441. Höpker, Karin. “Happiness in Distress - Richard Powers’ Generosity and Narratives of the Biomedical Self.” Ideas of Order: Narrative Patterns in the Novels of Richard Powers. Eds. Antje Kley and Jan Kucharzewski. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012, 285-312. Hornung, Alfred. “Life Sciences and Life Writing.” Anglia 133.1 (2015): 37-52. Hume, Kathryn. “Moral Problematics in the Novels of Richard Powers.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54 (2013): 1-17. Kay, Lily E. Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge/ MA, London: Harvard UP, 1993 [1991]. ---. “Powers of the Facsimile: A Turing Test on Science and Literature.” Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers. Eds. Stephen J. Burn, Peter Dempsey. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008, 263-291. Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. “Metanarration and Metafiction.” Handbook of Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn et al. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 344-352. O’Riordan, Kate. “Writing Biodigital Life: Personal Genomes and Digital Media.” Biography 34.1 (2011): 119-131. Pinker, Steven. “My Genome, My Self.” The New York Times Magazine. 7 January 2009. http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2009/ 01/ 11/ magazine/ 11Genome-t.html (last retrieved on March 2, 2016). Powers, Richard. “The Book of Me.” GQ. 30 September 2008. http: / / www.gq.com/ story/ richard-powers-genome-sequence? currentPage=11 (last retrieved on March 2, 2016). ---. Generosity: An Enhancement. New York: Picador, 2009. Genomic Life Writing and Genomic Fiction 141 Pyrhönen, Heta. “Genre.” The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Ed. David Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007, 109-123. Ridley, Matt. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. New York: Harper Perennial, 2000. Roof, Judith. The Poetics of DNA. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Schäfer, Heike. “The Pursuit of Happiness 2.0: Consumer Genomics, Social Media, and the Promise of Literary Innovation in Richard Powers’s Novel Generosity (2009).” Ideas of Order: Narrative Patterns in the Novels of Richard Powers. Eds. Antje Kley, Jan Kucharzewski. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012, 263-284. Staes, Toon. “The Fictionality Debate and the Complex Texts of Richard Powers and William T. Vollmann.” Neophilologus 98 (2014): 177-192. Waugh, Patricia. “Science and Fiction in the 1990s.” British Fiction of the 1990s. Ed. Nick Bentley. London, New York: Routledge, 2005, 57-77. Zapf, Hubert. “Das Funktionsmodell der Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Imaginative Texte im Spannungsfeld von Dekonstruktion und Regeneration.” Funktionen von Literatur: Theoretische Grundlagen und Modellinterpretationen. Eds. Marion Gymnich, Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2005, 55-77. III. Literature in Response to Cultural Change