Abstract

This project aims to defend the literary realist novel’s ability to examine individual experiences of global climate change. It is prompted by Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2012), wherein Ghosh claims that the qualities central to defining the literary realist genre are perhaps irreconcilable with large-scale forces like climate change. He wants a novel that can accommodate climate change as a hyperobject, and not step into the realm of science fiction or fantasy. He wants a novel that considers the collective but does not just survey the surface of reality. With Ghosh’s concerns in mind, I examine three novels: Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2022), Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018), and Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020). The conclusion of this project offers a text for further consideration, outside the bounds of realism, in Rita Indiana’s Tentacle (2015). I argue that even in literary realism, language can be experimental, representational, and capable of defying the limitations of genre—and further, that taking these and other texts together to assemble a mosaic of experience is how literary realism can overcome Ghosh’s concern that climate change is too vast an issue to be appropriately addressed in this genre.

Advisor

Beutner, Katharine

Department

English

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities

Publication Date

2023

Degree Granted

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type

Senior Independent Study Thesis

Download

Share

COinS
 

© Copyright 2023 Hannah Keough