Title: Music, DNA, and Posthuman Community in Powers’s Orfeo

Abstract: Orfeo is Richard Powers’s third science novel on genetic technology. It carries on with the transhumanist anxieties about technology found in his two earlier “genetic novels,” while also articulating a more affirmative vision of posthuman forms of life and relationality. Beginning with the affective function of music and art education, the novel reveals how art, like DNA, participates in encoding the life of the protagonist, Els, thereby presenting the dual and unified nature of art and technology at the level of techne. By rethinking the essence of technology, Powers proposes a relational understanding of technology that challenges the instrumental view, responding to the posthuman condition of human–nonhuman coexistence in the technological age. On this basis, the novel constructs a relational posthuman subjectivity, reconsiders the relationship between the self and the other within the discourse of American individualism, and ultimately reimagines a posthuman community of life among diverse forms of existence.

Keywords: Richard Powers, Orfeo, music, gene, posthuman community

Author: Jie Yuan, Associate Professor, School of International Studies, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.03.008