IN HIS 2016 BOOK The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh discusses some of the political and economic reasons why the powers that be remain shockingly oblivious to the urgent threat posed by climate change. While his title makes clear just how insane he finds that lack of action, he focuses closely on the failure of literature, especially the mainstream literary novel, to deal effectively with climate change and thus help make people more aware of the problem. On the other hand, after the publication of Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Overstory in 2018, Ghosh declared in a conversation with David Wallace-Wells that the novel might be “a major turning point—not just because it is a great book, which it is, but because it was taken seriously by the literary mainstream.” Ghosh does not go into detail in the interview about why The Overstory might be something genuinely new, but a look at that novel shows that it does indeed overcome the limitations cited by Ghosh in The Great Derangement, largely because it escapes the humanist-individualist ideological straitjacket that has historically made it difficult for the novel to deal effectively with large, complicated problems. By contrast, The Overstory uses an array of postmodern literary techniques to make some telling political points about the nature of the current climate crisis and the possible human (or posthuman) future this crisis portends.
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