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The seminar engages with selected "classics" of climate change fiction. In addition to discussing how climate change is represented in different genres (the "realist literary novel" as well as the science fiction novel, short fiction, short plays), we will also engage with the potential role of literature and literary studies in addressing climate change as a grand societal challenge: Can literary texts help "understand" climate change? Can they raise awareness? Can they "convert" climate sceptics? Or are these texts only read by those who do not need to be convinced any longer? Or is this the wrong question anyway, because it misunderstands how literature "works"?
Participants are asked to buy and read the following novels (please make sure you get exactly these editions - this will make class discussions very much easier): Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl, London: Orbit, 2010. Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow, New York: Picador, 2014.
One further novel will be agreed upon in the seminar. This might be T.C: Boyle's A Friend of the Earth, London: Bloomsbury, 2019 [2000]; Ian McEwan's Solar, London: Vintage, 2011; or Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain. New York: Bantam, 2005.
A reader with an initial selection of shorter texts will be made available to intending participants from early October onwards. Further texts can be agreed upon in the seminar. |
