ENGL 1102: Weird Writing for Weird Times

Course Description

Climate change is in the news a lot these days, and the news looks pretty bad. But while environmental catastrophes and collapsing ecosystems often appear in our newsfeeds, you may have slowed your doomscrolling enough times to notice that these problems are often presented without solutions–at least not clear or easy ones. This course examines the ways that reading, writing, and creative invention begin to intervene in urgent climate questions yet without answers. Considering these activities as ways of paying attention to the reality of the climate crisis unfolding, we will study and produce(!) texts that participate in envisioning sustainablefutures and planetary communities. In contrast to the bleak tone of climate reporting, our work in this course will be imaginative, even playful, and possibly hopeful. It will also be grounded in a practice of sustained critical and reflective engagement with real-world concerns, media and literary representations of those concerns and their resulting social and cultural movements, and sound, timely research methods.

ENGL 1102 Syllabus Spring 2022