ENG 200QClimate Fiction

Catalog

ENG 200Q Climate Fiction - What does it mean to think of climate change as a problem for the art of fiction? We usually understand global warming through scientific models or policy debates. But fiction writers have long explored how the all-encompassing yet elusive effects of a changing climate demand new ways of crafting artful narratives. This course explores Anglo-American fiction about climate change from the late nineteenth century to the present. We'll read early science fiction by E.M. Forster and H.G. Wells alongside more recent work by Jeff VanderMeer and Kim Stanley Robinson, connecting their thrilling genre fiction to the more overtly experimental work of Virginia Woolf and Ben Lerner. Ranging from the despairing to the hopeful, the surreal to the realist, these fictions imaginatively represent the environmental forces that shape capitalism's development- and may end up destroying it.