Eco-Ekphrasis in Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Bewilderment
Eco-Ekphrasis in Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Bewilderment

Summary/Abstract: If in antiquity the term ekphrasis was used to denote a speech that stimulates mental visualization, then in contemporary discourse, ekphrasis refers to a wide array of intermedial phenomena, from descriptions of paintings and sculpture to the integration of film, photography, and digital media in literary works. Evolving in a time of environmental emergencies, contemporary ekphrastic writing often engages with various media products that address the environmental crisis, such as ecological artworks, television footage of environmental disasters as well as painterly, photographic, and digital images of the Anthropocene. As Gabriele Rippl observes, ekphrasis can invite the reader to engage with ecological issues and “conceive of the human-nature relationship in a new non-anthropocentric way” (“Sustainability” 221). Rippl then introduces the term “eco-ekphrasis,” thereby bringing together considerations of intermediality and ecology in literature (“Sustainability” 225). My approach to eco-ekphrasis is informed by new materialist thought, which aims to challenge the anthropocentric idea of human mastery over the material world. Taking as case studies Richard Powers’s novels The Overstory (2018) and Bewilderment (2021), this essay explores how eco-ekphrasis can draw attention to large-scale ecological processes and the effects of the Anthropocene, while simultaneously cultivating a sense of embodied, material embeddedness in the more-than-human world.

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