THE NATURE OF SYNTHESIS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY, SCIENCE AND FICTION IN "GALATEA 2.2" BY RICHARD POWERS
The paper focuses upon the poetic incorporation of factual elements (autobiography and science) into the fictional realm of the novel “Galatea 2.2” written by the contemporary American writer Richard Powers. In the context of this problem we discuss the new genre of the encyclopedic narrative. The study aims to find the elements of scientific and autobiographic discourses at different levels of text and detect the functions of these elements within the novel. We also analyze the poetics of the resulting synthetic prose. The complex analysis demonstrates how autobiographic facts are transformed into a written text with the help of different narrative technics, and how the fusion of scientific and fictional elements provides a poetic device, serving many purposes of the novel, for example, more profound depictions of characters. The factual material introduced in the text is a thematic resource as well as an aesthetic component that influences stylistic peculiarities of the novel. This incorporation of information and knowledge from different scientific disciplines (programming and cognitive sciences) into the fictional text corresponds to some characteristics of the encyclopedic narrative genre, however, it can be interpreted in a different way.