Climate Lyricism

In Climate Lyricism Min Hyoung Song articulates a climate change-centered reading practice that foregrounds how climate is present in most literature. Song shows how literature, poetry, and essays by Tommy Pico, Solmaz Sharif, Frank O’Hara, Ilya Kaminsky, Claudia Rankine, Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Richard Powers, and others help us to better grapple with our everyday encounters with climate change and its disastrous effects, which are inextricably linked to the legacies of racism, colonialism, and extraction. These works employ what Song calls climate lyricism—a mode of address in which a first-person “I” speaks to a “you” about how climate change thoroughly shapes daily life. The relationship between “I” and “you” in this lyricism, Song contends, affects the ways readers comprehend the world, fostering a model of shared agency from which it can become possible to collectively and urgently respond to the catastrophe of our rapidly changing climate. In this way, climate lyricism helps to ameliorate the sense of being overwhelmed and feeling unable to do anything to combat climate change.

“At the Speed of Trees”

This essay applies Riane Eisler’s biocultural partnership-dominator model as a relevant testimony of how transdisciplinary approaches to literature can broaden our critical scope, methodology and understanding when examining different types of texts. This comprehensive methodology for the study of literature draws upon different fields of knowledge and scientific investigation, such as quantum physics, biology and systemic science, ecosophy, ecoliteracy and contemporary studies on plant life. With the aim of rekindling the fundamental relationship between humans and nature, Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory (2018) is analysed as a powerful denunciation of the current dominator, destructive, violent world-view pervading our planet. If the Earth and its inhabitants are portrayed as being controlled and exploited, the novel also unmistakably reinforces the fundamental values of the partnership cultural paradigm, which focuses on the caring potential of human love and reciprocity

“All business as usual”: Richard Powers’ Gain and the Complicities of (Re-)Incorporation

Renowned for his thoroughly researched ‘discursive narratives’ that trace in near-encyclopedic mode the complex interconnectivity of life in our (post-)postmodern period, Richard Powers’ Gain ambivalently raises the stakes of politics in the novel of late capitalism by asserting the imaginative agency of fiction itself. But how does one employ fiction to redress the simulacral hollowing out of everyday life in a corporate culture that fabricates reality by molding consumer desire to its own ends, specifically the end of financial profit? Can the ethical acknowledgement of complicity do away with its inevitability and even willingness within the unmappable totality which is our late capitalist moment? Gain confronts this problematic in ways that both resist and embrace it. The novel’s seemingly intentional ambivalence that mimics, yet strives to invert, the unashamed cynicism of late capitalist ideology finds a point of obdurate insistence in the ‘corpo-reality’ of the human body itself. At the same time, it imagines a vehicle of transcendence in the re-incorporation of that body or, more specifically, that body’s agential possibilities in a sphere beyond mere economic interest. Yet the asymmetry patent between the body’s death and the deathless corporation, despite the narrative parallelisms that the novel damningly establishes, returns us to the ambivalence of fictional ambivalence itself and the ethical dilemma of imagining ourselves beyond the currently unimaginable real.1

‘Modulation’ by Richard Powers: Digital sound, compression and the short story

This article presents a reading of ‘Modulation’ (2008) by Richard Powers. Firstly, I consider the short story’s representation of the MP3 music file, specifically its effects on how music is circulated and stored, as well as how it sounds. These changes are the result of different processes of compression. The MP3 format makes use of data compression to reduce the file size of a digital recording significantly. Such a loss of information devises new social and material relations between what remains of the original music, the recording industry from which MP3s emerged and the online markets into which they enter. I argue that ‘Modulation’ is a powerful evocation of a watershed moment in how we consume digital sound: what Jonathan Sterne has termed the rise of the MP3 as ‘cultural artifact’. I contend that the short story, like the MP3, is also a compressed manner of representation. I use narrative theory and short story criticism to substantiate this claim, before positioning ‘Modulation’ alongside Powers’s novels of information. I conclude by suggesting that ‘Modulation’ offers an alternative to representing information through an excess of data. This article reads Powers’s compressed prose as a formal iteration of the data compression the story narrates.

Two-Way Time Travel

This chapter considers the new relations of past and present to future that have emerged in the wake of scientific discoveries in genetics and other medical technologies. The first section links Australian novelist Gerald Murnane with established English writer Ian McEwan, suggesting how for both writers the representation of memory, cultural as well as personal, has been mediated by developments in science. The second section, ‘The American Systems Novel’, extends this analysis by considering how genetics shape the plot of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex and how 9/11 scrambles understandings of temporal sequence in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It concludes by discussing how the historical context of postmodernist science inflects representations of temporal sequence in the novels of Richard Powers, which address issues of computer technology, ecology, and environmentalism, while also representing the aesthetics of temporality in relation to the abstract language of music.

O ludziach i drzewach. „The Overstory” Richarda Powersa

O ludziach i drzewach. „The Overstory” Richarda Powersa [Recenzja powieści: Richard Powers, „The Overstory”, William Heinmann, London 2018, ss. 502]