Jason Childs
Jason Childs is an Australian writer and researcher, currently living in France. He completed his PhD at the University of Technology Sydney, where his research focused on the relationship between literature and cognition. He is currently writing a book on recent works of essayistic fiction.
All essays by Jason Childs
Our Root Problem: The Overstory by Richard Powers
‘Words before words’: in opposition to several hundred years of humanist ideology, Powers’ twelfth novel insists, from its very first page, on meaning as something other than, and more than, the projection of culture upon nature’s blank screen. Trees, we will later be told, are ‘making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain’. Indeed, Powers strives throughout to suggest how the would-be-autonomous sphere of human meaning depends upon those deeper orders that it has, in the modern era, gone to such pains to dismiss.