Religion, Lit, Climate Change

Catalog description

Taught by GTU/CSS. This advanced seminar (PhD, MA) surveys recent contemporary literature and critical theory related to our environmental crisis: a crisis that is, if anything, the catastrophic failure to collectively imagine. If climate change fundamentally unsettles the ontological and epistemological premises of the humanities (as Dipesh Chakrabarty proposes), what, then, happens to the interdisciplinary field of religion and literature? What does "planetary literature" look like for an "aesthetic education" (Spivak) that models alternative pasts, presents, and futures for the human and the other-than-human? Readings will include Amitov Ghosh (Hungry Tide), Margaret Atwood (Year of Flood), David Mitchell (Bone Clocks), and various representatives from the ecopoetics movement; environmental and ecocritical theory will largely be drawn from the "new" materialisms that have fruitfully dialogued with process thought (and theology) following A.N. Whitehead. Final research paper, seminar presentation. Course Audience: PhD / MA, Auditors with permission. Oral presentations; final research paper.