Scarlett biblio2

Richard Ford, Be Mine (2023)

Philosophical Underpinnings:
• Mortality and Finitude:
Be Mine is soaked in Heideggerian questions about Being-toward-death. Frank Bascombe accompanies his terminally ill son, knowing death is imminent — but the novel treats death not just as tragedy, but as an absurd, almost banal event ("another thing to get through").
Key theme: How should a life be lived in full awareness of its absurd, unavoidable end?
• The Meaning (or Meaninglessness) of Happiness:
Ford asks whether happiness is an illusion necessary to survival. Bascombe's reflections on his own mediocrity and failure mirror existentialist concerns: is it better to live self-aware and unhappy, or deluded and content?
• Ethics of Caregiving:
There's a raw philosophical question here: What is owed to another in their suffering? Ford presents care not as noble, but as messy, exhausting, disillusioning — more Iris Murdoch than Immanuel Kant.

Where critics brush against this:
• Kevin Power (The Guardian) hints at the novel's "existential drift" but doesn't fully dive into it.
• Mark Athitakis (LATimes) notes the question of "good enough fatherhood" — an echo of ethical adequacy.

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Richard Powers, Playground (2024)

Philosophical Underpinnings:
• The Future of Consciousness (AI and Humanity):
Playground stages a world in which artificial and human intelligences are converging. Powers asks: What distinguishes natural life from created intelligence?
It's vintage Powers: blending philosophy of mind, environmental ethics, and speculative metaphysics.
• Interconnectedness and Environmental Philosophy:
Following The Overstory and Bewilderment, Powers again returns to deep ecology. The ocean, in Playground, becomes a metaphor for consciousness itself — vast, mysterious, endangered.
• Postcolonial Critique:
There's an underlying ethical interrogation: how do emergent technologies colonize not only ecosystems but the inner lives of marginalized peoples?

Where critics brush against this:
• Yagnishsing Dawoor (The Guardian) catches the Anthropocene and AI threads.
• Ron Charles (Washington Post) notices the environmentalism but underplays the mind-body problem questions Powers is threading through the plot.

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In Short

Both novels wrestle — sometimes quietly, sometimes stormily — with how life makes (or fails to make) meaning in worlds that are collapsing (personally, culturally, environmentally).

You could honestly frame your entire course around a question like:

How do contemporary American novelists confront the crisis of meaning in an age of death, environmental degradation, and technological transcendence?

Ford answers with resignation and absurdism.
Powers answers with wonder and radical hope.