Thursday, March 12, 2009

Posting on Children in The Gold Bug Variations

A Vanderbilt University blog on Genetics and Literature has a recent post on attitudes towards children in Powers's Gold Bug Variations.

An excerpt:

By reconceiving of children as cyclical, endless processes, the scientist [Ressler] invokes what Clayton [Jay Clayton, author of Charles Dickens in Cyberspace] refers to as “genome time,” which is unconcerned with the existence of the individual; but by emotionally breaking down at an encounter with an individual child, Ressler (and by extension Powers) privileges the human as well.


You can read the entire post by following the link in the title of this post.