Multiperspectivity and Cultural Ecology in the Novels of Richard Powers

American writer Richard Powers has a background in computer programming. He writes novels in which science, technology, history, nature, and everyday life coexist in one complex environment. At its center, there are individuals with storylines that sometimes flow in parallel, sometimes intersecting and sometimes overlapping through the author’s use of multiperspective narratives.
Even though the novels written by Powers often deal with environmental issues and the interaction between culture and nature, his work has not yet been extensively analyzed with an interdisciplinary approach capable of targeting the connection between his ethics and aesthetics. A respective analysis seems promising because it might lead to an understanding of the relationship between the transformation of nature and cultural processes. I argue that Richard Powers’ novels expose a connection between multiperspective narration and cultural ecology. Multiperspective narration is an insightful means of problem posing, as it can represent and renegotiate the relationship between topics and between nature and culture in order to transform them. To assert this, I will study three novels that expose a progressive pattern in their engagement to ecology: “Gain” (1998), “The Echo Maker” (2006), and “The Overstory” (2018).

My research aims to analyze how Powers’s narration creates, within the literary system, a plausible reality, in which it is possible for him to link different kinds of communication, raising the awareness of the reader. More specifically, Powers merges environment, scientific development, and social dynamics. Thus, multiple communication systems are brought together in a constructed environment committed to highlighting the interdependency and interconnectedness of these systems within a constant process of mutual transformation.

Lucia Medici is a Ph.D. student at the Wissenschaftszentrum Umwelt, Augsburg University. Contact: lucia.medici@uni-a.de