Writing Climate: Form and Crisis

This course asks: what is unique about literary representations of environmental questions? What can a poem say about climate change that a novel can’t, and vice-versa? What about a memoir, a lyric essay, a documentary film, or a play? In focusing on the specific qualities of individual forms, this research-led course participates in current postformalist critical developments which seek to connect formal analysis with political, here specifically environmental, ideas. Accordingly, each week students will consider a specific formal category in light of a specific environmental category. These categories may include, but are not restricted to, such concepts as ‘extinction’, ‘corporate sustainability’, ‘slow violence’, ‘extraction’, ‘more-then-human agency’ and ‘entanglement’. Cumulatively and comparatively, students will build an understanding of human culture’s contribution to environmental crisis and transformation.