The seminar focuses on climate fiction, but it also includes non-fiction works. We will discuss a variety of questions ranging from literary concerns such as narrative strategy, genre, and fictionality to social and cultural questions: What is at stake in Cli-Fi? How to understand the relation between aesthetics and politics, literature and activism? What is the role of the author in this particular literary field? How to represent an ecological catastrophe of this scale? In an attempt to answer the last question we might turn to Amitav Ghosh‘s The Great Derangement (2016).
A possible reading list might include J.G. Ballard‘s The Drowned World (1962), John Lancaster‘s The Wall (2019), Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations (2020) and Diane Cook‘s The New Wilderness (2020). We will finalise the reading list together at the beginning of the term.
As non-fiction writing of the present is extremely influential in shaping both future scenarios and the collective imaginary we will also study some non-fiction essays and discuss their aesthetics and their uses of literary techniques: for instance, Nathaniel Rich’s ‚Losing Earth‘ (New York Times Magazine, 2018), and David Wallace-Wells‘ ‚The Uninhabitable Earth‘ (New York Magazine, 2017). |
