ENGD55H3F
Course Name: Literature, Politics, Revolution -- Climate Futures
Instructor: Prof. Christine Bolus-Reichert
Course Description: The writer Paul Kingsnorth’s entire career, until recently, had been taken up with fighting to save what was left of wild places. But as he explains in Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (2017), mainstream environmentalism is failing, because it’s doing nothing to change how we think. In his view, that’s what stories can do, so we need to tell different stories.
This course focuses on how stories about our climate future will help to shape it, the ones we read (memoirs, essays, and speculative fiction by Kingsnorth, Amitav Ghosh, Sonali Deraniyagala, Octavia E. Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot, and Doreen Vanderstoop) and the ones we write over the twelve weeks of the course: a “world-building” project in which students tell stories about their own climate futures.
Course Features: Students’ contributions to the project will take whatever literary/artistic/critical form they feel will best express their vision of adaptation and survival. In addition to the seminar project, students will write four short reading responses over the course of the term and lead seminar one time (highlight part of the reading and pose three discussion questions to the class).
Course Delivery: This course will have an IN-PERSON section and an ASYNCHRONOUS online section. Face coverings and social distancing are required for all students attending in person; in-person attendance is recommended, but not required.
Learn more about Prof. Bolus-Reichert's teaching and research, as well as how to contact her with any questions.
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