Abstract
Philosophies of panpsychism pose a challenge to the way we theorize literary narratives and how we frame strategies of anthropomorphism in particular. This chapter engages that challenge, more specifically, by reading attempts to narrativize the temporality of nonhuman entities in print and digital narratives. Richard Powers' novel The Overstory (2018) and Mark Sample's digital fiction "Content Moderator Sim" (2020) anchor questions of experientiality concerning trees and algorithms, respectively. It is argued that even if the project of understanding the phenomenological life of nonhuman others is ultimately a logical, biological, or cosmological impossibility, attempting to represent it remains a cultural and ethical imperative.