Eco-trauma and Environmental Memory: A Critical Study of Richard Powers’s “The Overstory”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.70036/cltls.v3i1.26Keywords:
Ecocritical-psychoanalytic, Interpretation, Eco-trauma, The Overstory, Non-humanAbstract
Aims: This research applies an ecocritical-psychoanalytic interpretation on the massive piece of literature, “The Overstory”, written by Richard Powers in 2018, to examine the complex ideas of eco-trauma and environmental memory. Methods: . The thesis argues that the increasing issue in the present environmental crisis, specifically the deforestation and loss of biodiversity in the novel, becomes a massive traumatic incident in the lives of the human characters and in nature itself. Ecocritical criticism, specifically its concern with the role of the non-human agent, is combined with psychoanalytic approaches, specifically its principles on the mechanisms of trauma and repression, in order to explore the manner in which the tree characters’ conscious and unconscious experiences intersect with the human characters. Additionally, it uncovers the manner in which the loss for the characters is more than only an external ecological disaster, becoming instead an internal psychological injury that gives rise to the presence of grief, denial, and radicalism. Results: Moreover, it explores the manner in which “The Overstory” engages with the deep, web-like life of trees in order to show eco-memory, an archive for the ecological history that escapes the anthropocentric notion of forgetfulness in an ecological manner. Implications: The principal thesis is that Powers’s story succeeds in translating the private repressed eco-trauma into an ecosystemic understanding, emphasizing an essential need for an ecological self by converting the anthropocentric understanding into a more comprehensive eco-centric self.
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