Genres of the Anthropocene

1.5 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

All ideas have shape, and every story we tell, no matter its subject, has a literary form. This Core Pathways module in the environmental humanities starts from the apparently simple question: what is the aesthetic form of climate change? To engage it, we will together approach our human-made, geological present (“the Anthropocene”) as a set of conceptual problems that generate productive challenges for telling stories. These intellectual dilemmas have to do with coordinating massive systems and individual action, mass extinction and possible regeneration, resource depletion and unevenly distributed disaster, all of it set along a radically extended timeline that links the present to a geological past far beyond the capacity of any single human to imagine. What genres can tell this impossibly long story? How best to fit human-scaled dramas–the stuff of regular lives–inside the enormous fluctuations in earth systems that make climate change a planetary challenge? And is all this best understood in terms of tragedy, in which futurity is foreclosed and possibility extinguished? Or could it be (as Darwin thought) that it’s a strange kind of comedy too, always springing toward unimaginable futures? Reading may include science fiction, “cli-fi,” and the eco-disaster film, but also Greek tragedy, the Victorian novel, and the sonnet. Our written work will be rigorous, multiform, imaginative. Creative thinking encouraged.