ENGL 30017 - Writing a Warming World

Course Credit: 1
WRITING A WARMING WORLD Climate change is settled science, but the narratives constructed around climate change could hardly be more unsettled or unsettling. The problem of inaction on climate change is in many ways a problem of narrative-an inability to agree upon a shared understanding of how humans affect the natural world-and even climate change activists often feel overwhelmed by narratives that describe its effects. Inspired by novelist Amitav Ghosh’s monograph The Great Derangement, we will ask: what stories are being told about our warming world, and why has literary fiction generally failed to tackle climate change? What can ecocriticism, queer theory, and other critical approaches enable us to see in the texts that do address potential climate catastrophe? Prerequisite(s): ENGL-20000 and 2 literature courses or permission of instructor. [AH]