Finally, the interdisciplinary conflicts are read as scale conflicts which the characters in the novel encounter when they try to provide solution to the issue of deforestation.

It listens to the message of trees as lives mediating between multiple spatial-temporal scales and frames the characters’ sensitivity to this message as a scale awareness. Additionally, the novel endows the debate about interdisciplinary knowledge with a new light by ‘treeing’ its narrative in both its narratological form and thematic content. As our analysis shows, the novel reflects on the impact and value of interdisciplinary knowledge by presenting a narrative that traces the production and reception of a interdisciplinary work.

This tendency establishes a boundary between art and science and excludes literature from the realm of a ‘problem-solving’ practicality (Clark 190). This essay reads Powers’ novel against the tendency within our society to value literature only on the basis of individual artistic accomplishments. This essay argues that Richard Powers’ The Overstory is an example of how literature, as a narrative that is both reflective and focused on representation, contributes to current circulating debates surrounding the valorisation, productivity and practicality of interdisciplinary knowledge.

Inevitably, given the range of discursive sources, the findings are in part conflictual, although all can be seen to contribute in different ways to the current human-centred re-imagination of the perceived fraught relationship that exists between the natural world and the human being. The primary concern of this article is then to discuss some of the ways in which fictional texts have been augmented by popularising, fact-based discourses, most notably by the use of anthropomorphism, which supposedly permits the reader to 'imagine' the existence of the arboreal Other. The primary intention of this article is to explore some of the ways in which present-day readers, living in an age of increasing awareness of ecological change, interact with the concept of the 'tree' as it appears in a variety of discourses: children's fiction, TV documentary, scholarly writing, popularising ecological discourse, and recent mainstream Anglophone fiction, most notably that of the Turkish-British novelist Elif Shafak, whose The Island of Missing Trees (2021) features a sentient tree as a prominent narrator.

The secret life of trees book