Introductory description

What responses do literary and cultural texts afford in the age of intensifying climate impacts? What role, responsibilities and effective powers—might the Arts in general offer in the grand endeavour to mitigate the crisis and enact the kinds of transition that mitigation requires: in culture, but also in politics, economics, infrastructure, habitat? As students will discover, the range and volume of cultural registrations of climate breakdown are considerable and diverse. The module will provide a curated selection oriented around the ‘climate imaginary’—realist, speculative, creative and performative envisioning of climate-affected presents and futures in different spaces and times. Such imaginaries offer the means for a generative response to readers, audiences and publics charged with understanding and acting on climate issues. The module will cover a variety of themes and concerns, from extractivism to conservation; from scenarios of catastrophic weather, resource depletion and radically transformed habitats to dystopian worlds of geoengineering and utopian forms of community such as solarpunk and post-oil lifeworlds.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week One: Introduction to Climate Change: Conditions, Causes and Effects; Cultural Theory on Climate; The role of “Imaginaries” Week Two: Social Transformations—Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower (1993)/ Yōko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth (2018) Week Three: Learning the World—Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behaviour (2012) Week Four: Denial and its Consequences—Adam McKay (dir.), Don’t Look Up (2021) Week Five: Climate Dystopia—Collapse (1)—John Lanchester, The Wall (2019) Week Seven: Futuring—The Museum of Carbon Ruins (2018-) Week Eight: Collapse/Recovery (2)—War, Peace, Repair — Omar Al-Akkad, American War (2018) Week Nine: Resistance—Activism in Song, Art, Performance Week Ten: Renewability/Solarfutures—Ganzeer, The Solar Grid (1) The Wretched of the Earth; Cixin Lui, The Wandering Earth (2000); Wanuri Kahui, Pumzi (2009); After Oil Collective, Solarities Selection from Jenny Fagan, The Sunlight Pilgrims (2016); Selected Solarpunk short tales.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate in broad outline a grasp of the nature, scale, causes and effects of climate change.
• Develop some understanding of recent cultural theory connected with climate change.
• Develop a critical approach to climate imaginaries that enables the construction of an argument, in both oral and written formats, through commentary on relevant (primary) cultural texts and artefacts.
• Demonstrate critical reading skills and an ability to develop a question about relevant literary and cultural texts that brings some theoretical (philosophical, anthropological, aesthetic, political, environmental, ethical, or scientific) context to bear on the analysis of one or more of these texts, making some appropriate use of scholarly reviews and primary sources.
• Demonstrate ability to present creative responses and approaches (written, visual, material) to the question of the imaginary and in particular show some grasp of the critical and creative methods and theories of ‘futuring’ as a form of climate action.
• Demonstrate ability to organize research on set module materials, showing appreciation for complexity and capacity to examine the premises of an argument.

Indicative reading list

After Oil Collective, Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice, ed. Ayesha Vemuri and Darin Barney (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). Jan Alber, Steffen Jöris, Wolfgang Römer, The Apocalyptic Dimensions of Climate Change (De Gruyter, 2021) Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman, Energy Humanities: An Anthology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). Roman Bartosch, Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, "Welcome to the Anthropocene," The Shock of the Anthropocene (Verso, 2016): 16-28 Marco Caracciolo, Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Unstable Futures (Bloomsbury, 2022) Cardoso Celermajer et al, “Climate imaginaries as praxis”, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 7:3 (2024) Climaginaries, “The Museum of Carbon Ruins: An Exhibition of the Fossil Era” Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35. 2 (2009): 197–222. Jeremy Davies, “Introduction” and “Chapter 2: Versions of the Anthropocene," The Birth of the Anthropocene (University of California Press, 2016): 1-14, 41-68. Simin Davoudi & Ruth Machen, “Climate imaginaries and the mattering of the medium,” Geoforum 137 (2022). Ashley Dawson, Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, (Verso, 2021) -----Extinction: A Radical History (OR Books, 2016) -----People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (OR Books, 2020) Carl Death, “Climate Fiction, Climate Theory: Decolonising Imaginations of Global Futures” Millenium, 50:2 (2022) Mel Evans, Artwash: Big Oil and the Arts (Chicago, 2015). Janet Fiskio, Climate change, literature, and environmental justice: poetics of dissent and repair (OUP, 2021) Jennifer Gabrys and Kathryn Yusoff, “Climate Change and the Imagination.” WIREs 2:4 (2011): 516-534. Christina Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis (Knopf, 2020). Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago, 2016 Jason Hickel. “Degrowth: A Theory of Radical Abundance,” Real-World Economics Review (2019): 54-68. Eric Holthaus, The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming (Harper One, 2020). Julia Hoydis, Roman Bartosch and Jens Martin Gurr, Climate change literacy, (Cambridge, 2023) Eva Horn, The Future As Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age, (Princeton, 2018) Mike Hulme, “Climate Imaginaries: climate change forever,” from Climate Change (Routledge 2021) Bob Johnson, Mineral Rites: An Archaeology of the Fossil Economy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). Adeline Johns-Putra, Climate change and the Contemporary Novel (CUP, 2019) Adeline Johns-Putra & Axel Goodbody, Cli-Fi: A Companion (2018) Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Knopf 2014) Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton, “How We Win,” from Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown, in Beyond the Ruins: The Fight Against Environmental Breakdown, a Verso Report (Verso, 2021) Caroline Levine, The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton, 2023) Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (12 March 2015): 171-180. Elizabeth M DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Duke UP, 2019) Gregory Lynall, Imagining Solar Energy: the power of the sun in literature, science and culture (Bloomsbury, 2020) Andreas Malm. The Progress of This Storm: On Society and Nature in a Warming World (Verso, 2018) Michael E Mann, Our Fragile Moment: how lessons from the Earth's past can help us survive the climate crisis (Scribe, 2023) ---- The new climate war: the fight to take back our planet (Scribe, 2021) Sarah E McFarland, Ecocollapse fiction and cultures of human extinction, (Bloomsbury, 2021) Antonia Mehnert, Climate change fictions: representations of global warming in American literature (Palgrave, 2016) Andrew Milner, Science Fiction and Climate Change: a sociological approach, (Liverpool, 2020) Jason W. Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of our Ecological Crisis,” Journal of Peasant Studies 44:3 (2017): 594-630 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard UP, 2011) Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (Columbia University Press, 2014): 11-33. Martin Puchner, Literature for a Changing Planet, (Oxford, 2022) Wolfgang Römer, “Scenarios of Human-Induced Climate and Environmental Changes at Different Spatial and Temporal Scales”, in Alber et al, The Apocalyptic Dimensions of Climate Change (De Gruyter, 2021) Joshua Schuster, What Is Extinction? A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals (Fordham University Press, 2023). Imre Szeman, Sheena Wilson and Adam Carlson, Petrocultures: oil, politics, and culture (McGill, 2017) Imre Szeman, Futures of the Sun: The Struggle over Renewable Life (Minnesota, 2024) Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: the Novel in a time of Climate Change, (UVA Press, 2015) UNFCCC (2016), The Paris Agreement Françoise Vergès, “Racial Capitalocene,” Futures of Black Radicalism, eds. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (Verso, 2017). Jennifer Wenzel, The Disposition of Nature (Fordham University Press, 2020): 1-46. David Wallace-Wells, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” New York Magazine, July 10, 2017. Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future (Verso, 2020)

Subject specific skills

Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of climate change as a cultural phenomenon Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of arts and theory based methods and techniques oriented towards climate action/futures

Transferable skills

Demonstrate developed oral and written communication skills focused on complex theoretical material.

Demonstrate critical thinking and an ability to analyze literary and cultural texts to uncover theoretical (philosophical, anthropological, aesthetic, ethical, scientific) contexts, and to synthesize ideas across a range of media and disciplines.

Demonstrate independent research skills and ability to curate issue relevant module materials.