Overstories: The Novels of Richard Powers (NeMLA)
Philadelphia
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA
American novelist Richard Powers earned immense recognition for his 2018 masterpiece, The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the William Dean Howells Medal. That sweeping novel has permanently altered the way its readers think about trees and about humanity’s place on the planet. Yet The Overstory is merely the culmination of three decades of fictions that have examined, with ambition and verve, a wide array of major cultural and scientific arenas. Many of his novels are, in a sense, overstories: lengthy, detailed, erudite explorations of the most important questions facing humanity. They have addressed subjects as vast as medicine and genetics, neurology and neurodivergence, music, race relations, the depredations of capitalism, nuclear war theory, and of course, the environment and climate change. For Powers, each person is a network of interdependencies, and so is our planet. Recognizing that fact, as he shows in The Overstory and other works, is essential for our survival as a species. By scrutinizing the intersections between science and the humanities, these novels dramatize how the humanities have changed, or have been changed by, real-world conditions.
Although Powers has been writing substantial, provocative novels since the early 1990s, his body of work, including the National Book Award-winning The Echo Maker (2006), has received surprisingly scant scholarly attention. This panel will be the first stage of a project that seeks to remedy that neglect and that will culminate in an edited essay collection. For this panel, I welcome papers that discuss individual novels or analyze any theme mentioned above that spans multiple works.
Please send 250-300 word proposals, along with a one-page CV, to Mark Osteen (mosteen@loyola.edu) by August 30, 2024.
Mark Osteen