Teaching Notes: Amitav Ghosh's "The Great Derangement"

The Great Derangement Cover

I've been teaching a class on "Global Climate Fiction" for graduate students this fall. It's a version of a class I've taught before at different levels, including an undergrad class as well as an earlier grad class called "Postcolonial Ecocriticism."

A mainstay of these classes is Amitav Ghosh's essay, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). In some classes, we've just covered part 1 of the book, but this fall we read the entire book.

On The Great Derangement, Part 1

The Great Derangement is a powerful example of inventive, highly accessible, socially engaged literary criticism in action. An accomplished novelist with a long career behind him, Ghosh is interested in the role of cultural work (including the work of fiction) in addressing the climate crisis. He suggests, at various points, that writers of serious literary fiction have been failing to address the crisis:

“But the truth, as is now widely acknowledged, is that we have entered a time when the wild has become the norm: if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these torrents, then they will have failed—and their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis.” (The Great Derangement)

He’s also interested in when and how scientific paradigms (i.e., gradualism vs. catastrophism) might be applicable to analyzing and categorizing works of literature. Along the way, he introduces a number of analytics that professional scholars could probably explore further.

Ghosh takes, at times, a very broad approach to the topic – he can draw on his knowledge of 19th century Bengali novels, Romantic poetry, contemporary literary fiction, and so on. Very few scholarly accounts of these topics would attempt to do the same – we tend to be much more specialized and limited to specific periods and regions. Sometimes that broad scope can also cause problems, since he at times makes claims that might cause questions or doubts. (If you say that a certain genre or niche in the literary world can’t represent climate change, what happens when someone published a book that tries to do that?) Put more positively, his overly general claims might create opportunities that scholars have then attempted to engage – to fill in the gaps in his account of topics like the oil encounter or, more generally, representations of climate change.

Slides for ACH (2026):

 I'm giving a talk at the Association for Computing in the Humanities conference, which is being held virtually June 24-26 this year. My talk will be on June 26 in the morning. The talk describes a newer digital collection, Adivasi Writers.

"Children of Men," anyone?

I don't have time to do justice to Children of Men, but both Joseph Kugelmass at The Valve and Mark at K-Punk have written long, excellent posts on the film, and I would recommend you to them.

The film is, visually, extaordinary -- it led to one of those rare nights where I couldn't sleep, not because the baby was waking up every couple of hours (though there was that), but because I was haunted by the film's spectacular cinematography.

My one reservation with Children of Men comes from the slightly-too-heavy Christian flavor of the humanism in the film. The filmmakers definitely distance themselves from fundamentalist Christianity (the ‘repentance’ cult is seen as deluded), but it’s very hard not to read the Birth of a Child as enabling the Redemption of the Human Race in anything other than Christian terms.

Perhaps it’s possible to deemphasize this because the film brings in so many secular progressive/liberal themes-—the totalitarian overtones of the War on Terror and the Department of Homeland Security, the persecution of immigrants/minorities, and the potentially devastating consequences of pollution on both the environment and on human health.

But all that couldn’t help me from feeling a little confused during the scene where Kee and Theo were walking down the street and soldiers were making the sign of the cross—as if the film’s ideology was shifting under my feet, and I was being offered a Communion wafer when I had thought I was eating Junior Mints.