ENGL 1102: Writing Climate Futures
Course Description
In his 2016 book, The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh claims that the climate crisis is not only an environmental or geopolitical problem; it is also “a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.” This course begins there, not with climate science or with policy, but with climate writing, both fiction and non, that strives to imagine the future. We will consider ways that reading, writing, and creative invention might intervene in urgent environmental questions yet without answers. Considering these activities as ways of paying attention to the the climate crisis, we will study and produce texts that participate in envisioning sustainable futures and planetary communities. In contrast to the often bleak tone of climate news, our work in this course will be speculative, playful, and potentially hopeful. It will also be grounded in sound, timely research methods and a practice of sustained critical and reflective engagement with this topic, its media and literary representations, its social and cultural movements.
Dr. Shannon Finck • August 22, 2023