First-Year Writing Seminar: Wild Weather: Writing About Climate and the Environment

Catalog description

The term “wild weather” implies that extreme climate events are unusual, once-in-a-lifetime, unfathomable, even entertaining. Yet since they are an increasingly common part of our everyday lives, the word “wild” suggests a failure to assimilate, understand, or accept this “new normal.” This class asks how short stories, novels, drama, and film can address this problem, providing us with the emotional and imaginative tools to overcome denial and cultivate realism, resilience, and sustainability. Narrative fiction and storytelling have traditionally aimed to help human readers sympathize with and relate to other humans, via shifting points of view, experiments with narrative time, and evocations of mood and (emotional) “climate.” What new aesthetic forms might we need now to engage meaningfully both with each other and with the nonhuman—and increasingly inhuman—climates and environments of the Anthropocene? Readings and viewings will include texts by George Saunders, Amitav Ghosh, Richard Powers, Chantal Bilodeau, Lucy Kirkwood, and Bong-Joon Ho.