Culture, Climate, and the Anthropocene’s Others

Using the theoretical framework of the Anthropocene, this course considers a wide array of aesthetic codes—from Ovidian elegy and Shakespearean tragicomedy to zombie narrative and postcolonial ghost stories—to investigate how distinct cultural forms contest, recast, and, at times, reinstate the (often-hierarchical) boundaries between human and nature, human and animal, and human and human. Through a sampling of poetry, narrative, and film, we will explore the uneven terrain of the Anthropocene, in which the feedback loops of race, class, gender, and other forms of social difference, along with geography itself, continue to separate humans, even as evidence mounts for the inseparability of humans from the rest of the planet, including its nonhuman inhabitants. Course materials will be provided in English and include works from Ishirō Honda, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Tommy Orange, J.M. Coetzee, and Bong Joon-Ho, among others.