ENG 442Literatures of Sustainability

Catalog

ENG 442 Literatures of Sustainability - Dominant models of sustainability - economic, environmental, social - fail to account for how trauma and chronic stress shape human capacity for connection, agency, and ecological relationship. This course addresses that gap by integrating affective neuroscience, climate science, and trauma science with literary and cultural texts and methods. Affective neuroscience establishes that chronic dysregulation - whether caused by interpersonal violence, systemic inequality, or climate change - predictably impairs prosocial behavior. What looks like entrenched bias or tribalism is often a physiological state that worsens under conditions of scarcity and ecological instability, making climate anxiety not just an environmental problem but a social and biological one. This reframes the five pillars of sustainability (Human, Social, Economic, Environmental, Cultural) as interdependent in ways conventional frameworks don't address (and Indigenous perspectives on environment do). Students engage this argument through cultural texts alongside the neuroscience of trauma, developing arguments that are adequate to both the physiological mechanism and the lived experience the literature and cultural texts represent. We will examine scientific papers and nonfiction, literary speculative fiction, cultural criticism, comedy, and documentary, exploring how scientific and humanistic perspectives inform each other.