The Survival of Specters: Hauntology and Richard Powers's The Overstory.

Richard Powers's The Overstory (2018) is acclaimed for its depiction of structural similarity between collectives of different species that analogously connects human and nonhuman others, such as trees and computer programs. In this essay I argue that, among the various forms of nonhuman existence in the novel, specters in particular are central to the narrative and deserve critical consideration. By examining them through the lens of Jacques Derrida's hauntology and its related concept of survival, alongside an ecocritical perspective, specters emerge as a distinct form of life that eludes the dualism of life and death. This hauntological and ecocritical approach invites us to see how Powers reconceives life itself as not only a familiar state of being but also an autonomous and paradoxical being that is inseparably part of us and irreconcilably other to us as well, compelling the reader to acknowledge the human as part of something larger: life itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]