Lit of Climate Change

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

What can literature contribute to the challenges of climate change and ecological devastation? In this course, we’ll tackle the issue head on, as a pressing question for both our historical moment and for the discipline of literary studies. In light of our institutional context at Georgetown Qatar, we will focus on aspects of environmental crisis that serve as points of contact between America and Qatar, including resource extraction, colonial encounters, and water. In the process we’ll encounter landscapes and stories that have been doubly transformed, both by the defamiliarizing work of fiction and by the changing climate. Primary texts for the course will come mainly from American literature, and students will have the opportunity to write a final research paper on a text from any global literary tradition. We will also read some relevant environmental humanities scholarship and selected texts from the growing body of work on climate change fiction. Readings for the course might include such texts as Frank Herbert's Dune, Claire Vaye Watkins's Gold Fame Citrus, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Word for World is Forest, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife, along with critical work by Amitav Ghosh, Rob Nixon, Adam Trexler, and others.