Climate Fiction and Fictions of Climate
Climate change, global warming and the resulting dwindling of natural resources are at the center of many heated social, media and political debates. President Trump tweets that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive” (6 Nov. 2012) and thus declares climate change to be a fiction. While the U.S. withdrew from the Paris Agreement in June 2017, the vast majority of scientists argue that climate change is real and will lead to global crises. In line with global concerns about our climate and the future of the planet, a new strand of literature has started to emerge with its origins mainly in the U.S.
Commonly referred to as “climate fiction” (Cli-Fi), this type of literature is concerned with human-made climate change and global warming and its impact on the geographical, political and social landscape. While some literary critics argue that climate fiction is not an established literary genre yet, novelist Margaret Atwood acknowledges that “there’s a new term, cli-fi (for climate fiction, a play on sci-fi), that’s being used to describe books in which an altered climate is part of the plot” and points to a change according to which dystopic novels are not about “hideous political regimes” anymore but are “more likely to take place in a challenging landscape that no longer resembles the hospitable planet we’ve taken for granted.”
In this seminar, we will encounter and learn to engage with different forms of narrative fiction concerning climate change. In the first half of the seminar, the focus is on literary representations of climate, more specifically on the now emerging genre of “cli-fi”. We will focus on the depiction of climate change in films during the second half of the semester. In the seminar, we will reflect on genre and develop skills in analyzing narrative and thus, we will engage with the following questions:
1.) What is genre and why can we consider climate fiction a coherent genre?
2.) What narrative attributes do novels about climate change have in common and what attributes do they not share with each other?
3.) How are novels different from films?
4.) What does one have to do differently as a reader when analyzing films?
5.) What is the role of literature/film in broader ecocritical discourses?
- Dozent/in: Isabella Karlsson