| Michael Frayn and Richard Powers, two contemporary writers of Great Britain and America, respectively, exhibit similarities in their characterological, narratological, and thematic approaches to their works, similarities that resist strict associations with modernist or postmodernist literary traditions. Despite Frayn's tendency toward comicality and Powers's tendency toward seriousness, these writers similarly establish themselves in their literary responses to human experience. Specifically, both Frayn and Powers develop a common theme and a common mode in their writing: the intricacies of family relationships and an ironic and tragic-comic, but not caustic, treatment of human character that reveals the paradoxical contemporary human experience. Powers's and Frayn's development of these qualities in their writing results in a sense of philosophical proportion, wholeness, and hope that precludes their works from classification as modernist or postmodernist writings. This sense of proportion then invites the question of how their works may be literarily, philosophically, and epistemologically placed and valued. In the novels discussed, the proportion of both Powers's and Frayn's introduction of the idea of "normality" in living emerges from their characters' relationship to natural, communal, corporate, and technological contexts. Thus, as each demonstrates how meaning may be found in their mimetic valuations of human interaction with others and the world, they also resist the standard epistemological and ontological authority of modern and postmodern literature, an authority insisting on nihilistic existential claims that human experience is isolated, that individuals are alienated one from the other, and that their lives are inevitably fragmented. |
