Ecocriticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene in Canadian Literature

3 credits · Graduate

In A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2019), human geographer Kathryn Yusoff contends “[n]o geography is neutral,” an adaptation of Trinidadian Canadian author Dionne Brand’s anticolonial assertion that “no language is neutral.” Together, Yusoff and Brand speak to two principles that anchor this graduate-level class in ecocritical approaches to Canadian Literature: first, they assert that the stories we tell about the (un)natural world matter. Literary analyses can accordingly help us see how climate change is culturally mediated. Second, they remind us that Western notions of place, space, and climate are grounded in histories of colonial dispossession, racial inequality, nationalism, as well as gendered exclusions. By drawing broadly on ecocritical theory, then, this class turns to Canadian fiction, autobiography, poetry, and film FORMATS: Seminar