Ohio State University offers cli-fi class in 2016 spring semester taught by professor Sandra MacPherson

English 3331 — ''Thinking Theoretically''

taught by Professor Sandra MacPherson

https://english.osu.edu/people/macpherson.4

Tues and Thurs 2:20  -3:40pm

*** see also a graduate seminar being taught at Tufts Univeristy by Prof. Liz Ammons
http://northwardho.blogspot.tw/2015/12/tufts-university-dan-blooms-alma-mater.html

resource and academic link farm: The Cli-Fi Report:
cli-fi.net


This course will introduce students to theoretical work on the Anthropocene Age -- a new geologic epoch characterized by the catastrophic effects of human action on the Earth's ecosystems.

Throughout the course we will survey the visual art and literature of the Anthropocene, from
the "cli-fi" of J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World, Ian McEwan's Solar, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, to disaster films such as Solyent Green, AI: Artificial Intelligence, and Beasts of the Southern Wild. Course requirements include weekly response papers, two short essays, an oral presentation, and a final exam.

There is as yet no agreed upon origin point for the Anthropocene: scholars and scientists point to the Industrial Revolution (c. 1760), to the transoceanic movement of species during the colonization of the Americas (c. 1610), and to the "Great Acceleration" (c.1950)-expansions in human population, the development of novel materials (plastics!), and fallout from nuclear bomb testing following WWII.

There are also a number of disciplinary approaches to the problem of climate change, and over the course of the semester we will survey different modes of theoretical thinking from the multispecies enthonography of Stefan Helmreich's Alien Ocean and Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World, to histories like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Dipesh Chakrabarty's "The Climate of History: Four Theses"; ecological studies such as Rob Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Ursula Heise's Imagining Extinction and Timothy Morton's Ecology After Nature; popular journalism on the topic such as Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, and Clive Hamilton's Requiem for a Species; and examples of climate change activism such as Paul Kingsnorth's Dark Mountain Project.

 Throughout we will survey the visual art and literature of the Anthropocene, from the eighteenth-century natural history painting of Joseph Wright and J. M. Turner, to post-war land art, to Lauren Bon's "Strawberries on Life Support"; from early American captivity narratives, to Romantic ecological poetry, to Victorian science fiction, to the "cli-fi" of J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World, Ian McEwan's Solar, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, to disaster films such as Solyent Green, AI: Artificial Intelligence, and Beasts of the Southern Wild. Course requirements include weekly response papers, two short essays, an oral presentation, and a final exam.