Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

Martin Kich (Wright State University)
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Powers’ eighth novel is a family saga in which race and music are interconnected and interlayered with elements of personal, family, racial, and national identity. On the one hand, the novel is a conceptual appropriation of the principles of physics—time and place, energy and mass, proximity and distance, momentum and inertia, refraction and reflection. On the other hand, it explores the fundamental concepts of artistic creation—composition, performance, adaptation, appropriation, assessment, and preservation. In a review for the

Sunday Tribune

in Ireland, Joseph O’Connor offers this succinct assertion about this novel: “This is a clamorously beautiful magnum-opus to possibility, as much as it is a love-song to lost hopes and disunited states.”

The novel focuses on the

4065 words

Citation: Kich, Martin. "The Time of Our Singing". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 26 March 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=21619, accessed 06 October 2024.]

21619 The Time of Our Singing 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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