Topics: Climate Change, Literature, and Slow Violence

Catalog description

"Climate Change, Literature, and Slow Violence" explores the important contemporary field of ecocriticism with a specific focus on urgent issues surrounding climate change and how writers are responding to our shifting reality. We will look back to growing awareness in the twentieth century that we are living in the Anthropocene era and continue with twenty-first-century representations and responses to planetary ecological change. In particular, the course focuses on the extent to which climate change is a social justice issue that overlaps with historical structures of class, race, and gender-based inequalities; the theme of "slow violence" brings these issues into focus. In addition to reading a series of novels by Aminatta Forna, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Amitav Ghosh, and Nathaniel Rich, we will structure our conversation with a few works of non-fiction: Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," Ghosh's "The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable," and Rob Nixon's "Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor."