Comments on: Throw William Deresiewicz Into the Echo Chamber

By: The futility of objectivity « Ob-Literate Academy

The futility of objectivity « Ob-Literate Academy — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:44:20 +0000

[...] human biology—and this group would include Richard Powers, whose most recent novel Deresiewicz disdained for telling us too much about human biology—tend to agree that the Theory wing reaches for its [...]

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 01:23:12 +0000

Incidentally, if you’re interested in another piece taking Deresiewicz to task for missing the point elsewhere (here in connection with Coetzee’s use of the third person in his “autobiographical fictions”, Boyhood and Youth), check it out:

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/summary_0199-11244_ITM

By: judith

judith — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 23:52:53 +0000

Also jumping the gun, because Deresiewicz’s claim about “our culture’s skewed understanding of the nature of fiction, and of knowledge” bugged me:

“It’s not just that we don’t understand the relationship between stories and ideas, it’s that there’s a particular realm of ideas to which we assign supreme value: science. Much of Powers’s early training was in physics and computer science, and the ideas around which he builds his novels are mostly scientific ones.”

For me [and yes, I'll be bringing this up till everyone is tired of it when the roundtable starts], Powers’ work is almost entirely about the relationship between stories and ideas, the echo making of narrative. And about how we make sense of the world through systems and patterns, some scientific, some linguistic, some natural, some artificial. Deresiewicz misses the point rather remarkably.