Climate fiction is a genre of storytelling that engages with perhaps the most pressing issue of our time: the accelerating effects of climate change. Amitav Ghosh insists in The Great Derangement (2017) that the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, so we will explore some of the ways that narratives explore and represent environments and ecosystems, and our own place within them. In this class we will engage with various modes and genres of storytelling—including short stories, novels, poetry, graphic novels, and film—to map the ways that climate fiction responds to and is shaped by diverse experiences and understandings of what it means to live (and perhaps even thrive) in solidarity and kinship with both humans and more-than-human beings during this epoch of the Anthropocene.
Some questions we will consider:
How do writers grapple with the question of what it means to live amid and through ecological destruction, and our own complicity in that ongoing violence? How do cli-fi texts trouble and resist the nature-culture binary? How do they grapple with the grief and anxiety of disappearing species and a wounded planet? How do they attempt to envision radical possibilities for better, more ethical ways of living in the world?
Assignments will include 2 essays, a rhetorical analysis of how climate/nature operates in a film or television show, a creative final project, and classroom discussion questions. In total, you will produce 4,000 words of prose to meet the Writing Intensive designation of this course.
Possible* texts include:
“The Gondoliers,” Karen Russell (short story, provided)
The New Atlantis, Ursula K. Le Guin (novella)
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (novel)
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Kate Beaton (graphic novel)
Once There Were Wolves, Charlotte McConaghy (novel)
Nature Poem, Tommy Pico (poetry)
Spirited Away (2001 film)
All other readings will be provided as pdfs on Laulima